13 March 2008, by Karl Bunyan
Exponetic's director Karl Bunyan will be appearing on the panel for London Business School's Technology Summit on Friday 13th March. 
Exponetic’s director Karl Bunyan will be appearing on the panel for London Business School’s Technology Summit on Friday 13th March. The theme of the event is “Monetising Social Networks” and the panel is entitled “Social Dynamics”. It’s intended to be a discussion of where will success fall within the social network space and whether anyone will “win” from the current crop of Facebook, MySpace, Google, Bebo etc.
More details on the event can be found here.
March 13, 2008 at 10:16 pm
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9 October 2007, by Karl Bunyan
From O'Reilly: Only 45 applications have more than 100,000 active users. The bad news, alas, is in our report: 87% of the usage goes to only 84 applications!
This article from O’Reilly on the long tail of Facebook applications ties in with some of the comments I made on the Exponetic blog a few weeks ago comparing Web 1.0’s history with Facebook’s own progress.
The key points are:
- Some applications are getting huge traffic
- The majority of applications aren’t
- Only 45 applications have more than 100,000 active users
100,000 users is still a lot of people (bearing in mind an active user is one who visits at least once per day).
As I originally said, I believe the best prospect is not in creating one killer viral application but in working towards a suite of applications. That’s the way to make the long tail work.
The long tail of Facebook applications
The Facebook platform: Web 2.0 or Web 1.0 a second time around?
October 9, 2007 at 2:49 pm
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4 October 2007, by Karl Bunyan
From Techcrunch: "In this article i'll explain how to use Facebook to make a big impact on your business, and why it's substantially different than any other social network that's come before."
This Techcrunch article on Facebook strategy is an interesting read. It not only covers the area of Facebook applications but also creating profiles, using networks and groups, and attempts to look into the future for how to monetise the growing social networking phenomenon.
Business networking on Facebook may not be the primary reason for joining, and if it is then Facebook may not be the place to be, but it’s certainly an area that can’t be ignored. Even status updates, imported blog posts, events and discussion board posts say something about what you’re doing and where. As another marketing and PR stream it has the potential to be a very low effort/return channel.
October 4, 2007 at 12:04 pm
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31 August 2007, by Karl Bunyan
The Facebook API as opened up a huge opportunity for developers to build applications with potentially huge audiences, but is Facebook's Web 2.0 just an accelerated cycle of Web 1.0 all over again?
The Facebook API as opened up a huge opportunity for developers to build applications with potentially huge audiences. This has shifted power slightly, away from marketing and towards those who build the applications.
As a result landrush has ensued whereby the successful applications can gain millions of users with almost no marketing effort. Everyone who can develop an app or wants to reach an audience is seeing this and wants a piece of it. The number of applications being released is growing every day and, with over 10,000 registered developers so far, shows no signs of slowing down.
But although the idea of using the Facebook API to create an easy-to-distribute, lightweight, socially-driven application is very Web 2.0, it strikes me that many the business models and the view of the future are very Web 1.0. Things such as:
- A large untapped market with low barriers to entry
- Lower marketing costs than other routes
- A relatively empty market, ripe for exploiting by early adopters
- Promises of future big bucks for anyone who can grab the ‘eyeballs’ of those millions of users
Indeed, we’re already starting to see the transition to later phases of Web 1.0 where the applications that have ‘the eyes’ have made it but those that haven’t are struggling. There are already succesful applications leasing their valuable space to wannabe applications, even from big Web 1.0 players such as Yahoo.
So where’s it all going to go? My predictions, based on Web 1.0 experience:
- The successful applications may keep their dominant position or may not. In the meantime they make money through fairly conventional advertising means.
- New applications find it harder to break into a large user base
- The number of applications grows so much it’s harder to get noticed at all and other means of promoting an application need to be looked at e.g. other online or offline marketing
- People start encouraging companies to add their Facebook application’s name to their business stationery
- Applications will have to work out better ways to monetise all those eyeballs
One of the differences, though, is that as a business model I don’t see the Web 1.0 ‘king of the mountain’ market leader as being a sustainable in the way that e.g. Ebay or Amazon are the undisputed conquerors of their sectors. That may change if the nature of the applications changes i.e. away from fun viral “toys” which go in and out of fashion and towards more useful tools.
Instead of a land grab I think another Web 1.0 phenomenon that Amazon has demonstrated - the long tail - may prove to be the way forward. A large number of applications with smaller user bases, each one generating a small amount of revenue. Successful developers will need to keep their apps fresh, and keep churning them out.
How far the comparisons hold out between Web 1.0 and Web 1.0 version 2 there is one distinct difference, though: the timescales are greatly accelerated. The Internet took a few years to go through the boom and bust cycle and move from eyeballs to revenue models; the Facebook Internet is doing the whole cycle in just a few months.
Learn more about Exponetic’s Facebook application development skills
August 31, 2007 at 2:48 pm
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7 March 2007, by Karl Bunyan
Before talking about paid blogging at the Centre for the Study of Financial Innovation, I thought it worthwhile to see just what there is out there already.
I’m due to appear as part of a panel at the Centre for the Study of Financial Innovation on the topic of “Blogging for profit”.
My place there is based more on technical input than blogging knowledge
but, as an active blogger who already makes a tidy $7 (approximately) a
month from Adsense, I thought a bit of research wouldn’t go amiss to get an idea of the bigger picture. I’ve posted the results of some of my investigations into paid blogging on my personal blog.
So far, the prospects of earning a living as a “small-time” blogger look pretty thin. I can write about a furniture shop in North Carolina and be paid $6, but that’s not exactly going to pay many bills. (It’s also not a subject I feel particularly well qualified to cover, having never been to America let alone one particular North Carolina furniture outlet.) It will be interesting to see how the round table goes tomorrow and what kind of ideas are covered and I’ll be putting a summary on here soon.
March 7, 2007 at 8:43 pm
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