Facebook Attrition and Twitter Trends

10:34 am - Mon, Sep 28, 2009: 43 notes

Facebook Attrition and Twitter Trends

I’m about to hit the hay, but just had a thought.

There are more people actively playing Farmville on Facebook than are on Twitter.

That blows my mind, for a few reasons. The $1B valuation / uber hype around twitter is one part of it. But coming from the other direction, that so many people would try out something so frivolous and un-fun as farmville is really quite amazing.

I get the same emotions when I look at trending topics on twitter. People get really excited about them. I think they are pop tripe. On the face of it, Twitter made a huge error highlighting them so much. The trending topics are doomed to be uninteresting to most people. Take a recent, sad example like #lightskin.

But I know I’m wrong. Most people want to see what most people appear to want to see. That thought is such a downer for me.

gbattle sez:

Ivan, you bring up two great Facebook and Twitter insights that I’ve been discussing a lot lately. You aren’t wrong, but maybe uninformed as to why.

Indeed, Facebook applications that are frictionless can become ubiquitous, but the more interesting statistic isn’t the adoption curve, but the attrition curve as a measure of the half-life of engagement/utility. How many people leave or abandon applications like Farmville and SuperPoke vs. apps like Mafia Wars and Scramble every week or month. Without having access to such data, my guess would be that certain applications like Farmville act like people doing The Wave in a stadium of 300mm people - the most excited jump up and scream with their close friends momentarily, leaving some drunken stragglers standing in the wake, hanging on well after the fun has passed. But hey, you work at Facebook, so you tell me?

As for your Twitter’s Trending Topics remarks and specifically your example, I think you’re ignoring the disproportionate historical importance of urban in mainstreaming social and mobile networking. A bit of history. Years before Friendster, BlackPlanet was gigantic, hip-hop made the Motorola Two-Way a fashion statement and texting a staple utility, the so-called digital divide was overcompensated for in the mobile space for personal digital communication, and advertisers have granted this demographic huge CPM’s attesting to both how valuable and elusive urban culture has become. There’s a reason why they created Amp’d, Boost and Cricket Mobile and not Alt Hipster Skinny Black Jeans Mobile. Urban culture has propped up icons who leverage artistic endeavors toward entrepreneurial ends - it’s Jay-Z Inc. and Diddy Inc., not Green Day Inc. or Coldplay Inc., and the bank accounts reflect the impact on consumption across mediums. The aspirational aspect of this culture, and how each step ladders to another - from artist, to record label owner, to clothing designer, to premium liquor/beverage, to actor, to publisher/filmmaker, to media mogul - is embedded. For better or worse, urban figured out me-focused-consumption-culture a decade after Regan’s 80s in a way that was both defiant and embracing of the original spirit.

Finally, make no mistake in confusing urban culture with African American culture as the former is a superset of the taste-making latter, and the data supports this with around 85% of hip-hop music and clothing selling to non-African Americans.

Now, I say all that to explain that without Twitter Trending Topics, we would never have recognized the tectonic cultural shift that has occurred before our eyes. A year ago, TechCrunch 50 held 8 of the 10 spots in the list. This year, it never even surfaced once due to Kanye, Jay-Z and Michael Jackson. Last week, on Emmy’s night and during NFL’s madness, the top spot wasn’t Neil Patrick Harris or The Jets, but #cuffhim, another of the so-called uninteresting yet perplexing urban memes. Wanna guess what will happen during SXSW next year? Given what I’ve detailed, it should be no surprise why urban culture has fixated on the most frictionless and mobile broadcast medium available. If MySpace and YouTube are indicators, this phenomenon will only increase.

Twitter is fast becoming urban culture’s 4Chan, just bigger. And to the beloved FourSquare (or some urban-focused derivation), you’re probably next.