Facebook Attrition and Twitter Trends

9:55 pm - Mon, Sep 28, 2009: 43 notes

Facebook Attrition and Twitter Trends

Trending

gbattle, these comments are really interesting. Thanks!

Though I have to say I think we’re making different points. My point is that I find pop topics uninteresting. Is your point that they are interesting to learn about what is pop? Are you really saying twitter is about real-time anthropology? I think the trending topics should only be there if they are immediately interesting to those on the site, not on some meta “we now know about ourselves” way.

Lots of those comments on #lightskin were basically about ass. What would the trending topics for all of humanity look like right now? My guess is that they would be: ass, money, food, booze, and sleep. Maybe God too.

My general point is that I don’t need to see that list constantly. How about trends-I-might-like? That would be more interesting (and far more like Facebook, I might add).

Facebook recommends people you might know and things you might like. Twitter recommends you follow celebrities and track pop topics. The difference is striking.

[edit: this is a bit too harsh, as twitter also has a contact importer stage in signup. But it doesn’t continue into the normal usage of the site]

Farmville

The story of Farmville is definitely in the rapid spread, not so much in the attrition rate that doesn’t exist yet. It is only a few months old! There is only a story there if it dies down quickly. It is so much larger than other previous apps that it is difficult to compare.

The numbers are ridiculous, making reasoning about them harder. Farmville has been around for about as long as it took Facebook itself to get another 50M new monthly active users.

You mention how Facebook makes it frictionless, but I don’t think that is the point. What makes Farmville huge isn’t the frictionless nature of platform, but that they add many points of friction. Try it out for yourself.

Note how many invites, gifting, neighboring, etc. steps there are? Zynga is getting very good at making people come to games.

Finally, I think the app story is best told through the lens of Facebook’s best product (by far): connect. Does the spread and attrition rate on Facebook have much to do with, say, how Foursquare uses connect? Not much. Applications that use Facebook to enable users to easily transfer identity, friends, and social context will be around for a while. Their success isn’t about a blip of fun on facebook.com proper.

gbattle sez:

Trending:

I understand your point regarding what you feel is and is not personally interesting. I’d rephrase this by saying that relevance has more to do with your circles of influence, namely your own voice and the people you follow**, than a generic measure across everyone. These signals/lists generated increase in value as the context becomes more refined. However useful this output would be, a “things you might like” list wouldn’t qualify as trending topics.

Unlike you, I’d rather have an area of Twitter where I can see more Trending Topics, not less. Let me plow through the long tail to my heart’s content. As someone who has reverse engineered more than a few ranking systems***, I understand that the longer the list they provide, the easier people like can back out their algorithm across factors like popularity, freshness, dispersion, etc..

As for the context of said trending tweets, I’d argue that there isn’t a communication medium - voice, print, phone, IM, Twitter, etc.- that hasn’t devolved into or evolved from the biological imperative of promoting, procuring and producing sexuality. Twitter isn’t immune, but if you think tweet discourse is bad, don’t jump on TinyChat or DailyBooth anytime soon - text plus, oh, never mind.

Farmville:

I guess we can agree to disagree on your first point. People love to talk about FB application growth, but the dirty secret is the half-life of application usage how many orphaned applications people have in their profile. Say what you want about Twitter, but the attrition rate there in terms of orphaned accounts is very auditable, probably as it’s not connected to any revenue generating activity (yet). The numbers for Farmville are ridiculous, as in laughable, because there’s not way to audit their validity or see the complete usage picture. Hence, making any comparison of Farmville to Twitter is specious at best.

All that said, the Zynga portfolio is killing it on Facebook. Now, how much they are killing it and with what kind of persistence, who really knows exactly, but how I feel doesn’t matter as the dispersion of their FB applications rules the kingdom vs. everyone else. Zynga has mastered asynchronous multi-player gaming and defined the genre.

Clarification: When I mentioned frictionless, I meant that adding an FB application, promoting your activity on said application, and recruiting on behalf of the application, are as frictionless as possible within the privacy constraints. That’s not a negative, it’s brilliant, and FB Connect’s ability to extend this quality beyond the walled garden is brilliant too. My issue remains that transparency would do FB well for 3rd party validation of their numbers - how they do this and still champion user privacy will be interesting.

Despite anything, it’s an exciting time to be a Facebooker or a Twitterer.

**my favorite subject

***ok, I have a few favorite subjects