Its Time For Applications To Apply Themselves

A look at the fortunes of applications and widgets across social networks

Like Facebook, both Bebo and MySpace have now opened up their platforms to support third-party applications, encouraging users to send mass notifications and invites across the big three social networks. But since their peak in November last year, all of Facebook’s top 10 applications have shown a significant drop in daily users. The novelty is clearly starting to wear off.

However, with measures such as ‘about the application’ pages and user reviews being introduced, it appears the social networks are adapting to the trends. Fundamentally, social media owners can’t afford to allow their properties to be overrun by poor quality or intrusive applications, or else they will alienate the user and spoil the opportunity for advertisers and brands to engage with their audiences in this way.

2008 may well be remembered as the year of Pirates vs. Ninjas, because we haven’t yet seen the introduction of the killer application used across not only our social network profiles but our desktops, smartphones and more. Creativity is required to bring ground-breaking functionality to the user and unforeseen access to audiences for the advertiser. Web 2.0 took its place amongst the mainstream web’s consciousness in 2007, but 2008 could be the year to prove the efficacy of the social application from not only a user, but a consumer perspective too.