Myspace/Facebook App Platforms & Total Installs

Within a few months, Myspace has quietly built an application platform with over twelve hundred applications. I previously posted a graph for Facebook app categories, in which I compared the categories using the number of active users. Unlike the older Facebook platform, Myspace only provides the number of installs:
myspace1.jpg
It took a few months before Facebook started publishing active usage and I’m hopeful Myspace will follow suit.

At a comparable stage, roughly four months after launch, Facebook already had 4,300 applications. On the other hand, developers should know that the most popular Facebook applications attract a higher share of installs and active usage. After four months, the top 10% most installed Facebook apps accounted for 97% of all installs. The top 20% represented 99% of all installs. The corresponding numbers for Myspace were 91% and 96% respectively. Economists sometimes use the Lorenz Curve to visualize and measure inequality. In both application platforms, the top applications account for most of the installs, with the Myspace platform being slightly less unequal:
myspace2.jpg

[Note: When I drew the preceding curves, I sorted from the most to the least installed applications.] One year after launching their platform, there are now more than 24 thousand Facebook applications! With more than 24K applications, the top 10 & 20 percent Facebook applications still have roughly the same share of total installs.

For more on the Facebook and Myspace platforms, Roger Magoulas of O’Reilly Research will present some of our most recent findings at the upcoming Graphing Social Patterns conference.

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