Facebook Applications - Features to Destinations

Everyone knows that the Facebook application gold rush is long over.  Facebook continues to impose restrictions, users have application fatigue, and as a result conversion on distribution methods has fallen through the floor. In fact, if you look at most of the early successes such as Free Gifts, Flixster Movies, and Zombies, their daily active users is on a downward trend.

To fight this trend, many of the applications will have to make the transformation from features to destinations themselves. This means that social interaction and relationships are being established within the application itself and not just building on the social relationships a user had previously built in Facebook. If you look at the couple verticals of apps that are actually doing well, dating and games, you can see that by default they have these types of features built in. They take what Facebook’s primary puprose, faciliting social relationships, and they do it in a way that you couldn’t previously on Facebook. Games typically do auto matching with other players, and dating apps introduce you for a very specific and common purpose.

Applications that started out as features need to make the transition to building in features that transform them into a destinations themselves. The novelty of these non-essential features has a half life on users and if they aren’t providing a long term reason to return (facilitating social relationships in new ways) then it is only a matter of time before they die.