Facebook Landgrab over? Just wait for the Corporations to move in

Widget Landgrab over? Not even close
We’re about two month or so into Facebook opening up their APIs for developers to create Applications on their existing platform, and there’s already a spur of growth. Venture Beat suggests that the initial gold rush is over, however I would strongly disagree. Corporations (where I focus) are just getting wind of Facebook and all the opportunities and challenges that exist. Like the first wave of the web, and then the second, Fortune 1000 companies are often slower to adapt, but when they do, they can pour immense resources into development and marketing. We should expect corporations to buy their way into this space, much how they did with Superman in Facebook.

Eyeballs on the News Feed
It’s amazing how there are tracks, sessions at conference devoted to Facebook, and even conferences emerging. Venture Beat and Dave McClure agree that the News Page is the new SEO. Term to know (or throw away): News Feed Optimization (NFO). The news feed is a feedreader, and gets the attention of a user, so as activity occurs, the newsfeed can quickly spur growth

MediaVidea has some fascinating stats:

As of now, 100,000+ programmers have signed up as Facebook Platform Developers – I suspect many of these are young programmers or people who did not find much currency in blogging and assorted web 2.0 opportunities.

- There are now more than 3000 Facebook apps.

- 70% of Facebook users already have applications on their page.

- Nine of the top 12 Facebook apps are owned by Slide (4), RockYou (4), and Facebook (1).

- Only 42 of over 3000 apps (1.4%) have over 1M users, and only 150 (5%) have over 100,000 users.

- While the blogging hordes get obsessed with SEO, Facebook Developers are getting heavy with NFO (News Feed Optimization) but here too the going is pretty tough – less than 0.2% of possible news feed items actually show up in the user’s Facebook feeds.

What brands are currently in Facebook?
Jeep, Victoria Secret, Wal-Mart (I’m watching closely) Apple Students, Dave Matthews Band, Ernst and Young, SouthWest Airlines, NoxZema and others have sponsored groups, widgets, or advertisements.

I’m still collecting data for my Digest of the Social Networking Industry, which I intended to be monthly, but I’m realizing it’ll have to be bi-monthly (end of August) due to the volume of data and I’m gathering. Here’s the previous and first one. Oh, and are you a Web Strategist who’s looking at Facebook? This strategy doc propel you with knowledge.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 21st, 2007 at 2:04 am and is filed under Social Networking, Widget Strategy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.