Facebook gets 1000+ apps in 30 days; Salesforce watchout!
By Vivek | June 25th, 2007 at 10:58 am ET
Over the weekend Facebook crossed 1000 application mark available in it’s Application Directory. To be precise the number stands at 1015 right now and has been going up by almost 50-100 apps per day.
As compared to last week, 20 applications now have crossed the 1 million install base. Top apps are still holding ground where we have not seen much of a movement. Some interesting trends emerging include - successful app developers launching multiple apps and also using their apps to promote apps from other developers. This should definitely involve financial transaction between the 2 parties per user delivered.
Existing web apps that have joined the Facebook platform in the past few days include Buxfer, Goowy Media, and Dapper among others.
As compared to Facebook, Salesforce AppExchange, a platform around which Facebook Application platform has been modeled, has managed to get only 590 apps in the past 1-2(?) years of it’s existence. Although you cannot really compare the level and quality of apps available on Facebook wrt Salesforce and also the target markets for which the application are developed, the net effect of the platform’s initial success will be that more developers will plan a move onto Facebook to take advantage of a fast moving crowd. Any given day, 25 million+ users on Facebook are going to be more lucrative than 1 million users on Salesforce for a application developer. And we are not even considering the viral ways in which an app spreads on Facebook resulting a sales cycle of few seconds as compared to the traditional marketing approach taken by Salesforce where sales cycle for your app can easily be few months. Also remember that Facebook does not want to be called social networking site anymore, which just shows the ambitions and targets in mind @ Facebook. Net net if Salesforce cannot deliver viral ways to grow and a larger audience to go for, developers are for sure going to think hard before developing an app for AppExchange.
on June 26th, 2007 at 1:21 am
Just wondering if you have any examples of applications that were going to be targeted for SalesForce that were then written on Facebook or of the 1k Facebook apps one that would seem to fit more neatly into the CRM space but was written on Facebook to increase its sales?
on June 26th, 2007 at 5:39 am
Dan,
I don’t think any of the apps offered at Facebook right now would be a good fit for Salesforce users. But, you need to remember that Facebook Platform is just 1 month old, and majority of the app developers had not expected such response from the users. Hence few of the apps have been custom made for F8 while others…….But pretty soon you will see some serious apps getting rolled out from developers who had a choice initially to develop either for Salesforce or Facebook and eventually choose Facebook ’cause of the big userbase.
on June 29th, 2007 at 5:26 pm
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