Affinitive is happy to announce that we have submitted an entry for our work with E.&J. Gallo Winery and their Redwood Creek brand in the “Talking” category.

We’re not exactly sure how the judging criteria works, but they are allowing the general public to rate and review each entry. Please check out our submission, and post a review/rating! And if you would like to learn more about how Affinitive is helping E.&J. Gallo “blaze the trail”, drop us a line!

However, the incessant spam and constant barrage of useless applications quickly led to a backlash among users. More importantly, it led to apathy from developers who became disincentivized to create anything worthwhile as study by Jesse Farmer points out. Social networks quickly realized that to keep their platforms a viable ecosystem, they had to provide value for all participants from developers to end users. Recently, the most stringent ant-spam measures to date have been announced by MySpace and Facebook.

Introduced in a post by Tom of MySpace himself, the new terms state:

No incentives may be given to a member for sending a message, bulletin, comment, or any other form of communication. This includes “points,” “bucks,” increased standing, or even features within the app.

Facebook’s guidelines have been changed to explicitly include:

[Applications cannot] require that users invite, notify, or otherwise communicate with one or more friends to gain access to any feature, information, or portion of the application.

While these new policies will inhibit the growth of spammy apps and improve the environment on various platforms, it’s unlikely that it will help with another complaint about social apps, that so-called “useful” applications aren’t successful. People will still want games and social interaction not office productivity apps.

But usefulness is in the eye of the beholder. Who’s to say that entertaining someone for 20 minutes or facilitating hook-ups are not useful in their own way? After all, procreation is one of the most important functions that any organism can perform, or as Nick O’Neill more eloquently puts it, “Social Apps Should Get You Laid.”

The phenomenal growth of Facebook after launching its application platform in May 2007 sent shockwaves to all other social networks. Where sites like MySpace had previously been actively attempting to block external widgets, they all began scrambling to implement their own APIs and embrace third party developers.

Now, a year later, the primary competitor to Facebook is clearly the Google developed open source OpenSocial which is finally launching on a consortium of sites including MySpace, Hi5, and Orkut. In addition to its own site, Facebook has also licensed its proprietary platform to Bebo (recently purchased by AOL.) Is this the beginning of the platform wars?

While it’s still early to see how it will all play out, a few observations can be made:

• Spam and other abuse of the system can be a huge problem. Facebook initially had very little restrictions in its messaging which allowed a few early apps to gain a huge advantage by massively spamming their way to the top. This also created a backlash among users who quickly grew tired of spammy tactics and all apps in general.
• Hi5, with fewer users than other networks, has proven to be amazingly viral. Perhaps this is due to the demographics of the users and the low number of apps in the directory (leaving a bigger slice of the pie for each one.) It also has unlimited messaging from applications, but so far, not too much spam.
• MySpace has demonstrated disappointing growth for applications. This may be partly due to the fact that after seeing how spam almost ruined Facebook, there are only a few APIs for sending messages which have only recently rolled out and have many restrictions such are requiring an active confirmation before sending. The application directory is not heavily promoted and has recently become flooded with hundreds of quiz apps and two or three apps for every single TV show or sports team, making it difficult for users to find other interesting apps.
• MySpace friends may have weaker connections than Facebook friends. This may be another reason for the much higher viral growth on Facebook, where applications provide an entertaining way for users to interact with their friends, with whom they already have a high level of involvement. MySpace users, in contrast, seem to be less involved with their friends, many of whom are probably just a collection of images for their profiles, and thus much less likely to participate in shared activities.
• OpenSocial provides limited functionality and is already fragmenting. The promise of OpenSocial is that is establishes a standard for the same code to run on multiple sites. While this mostly holds, the capabilities it offers when adhering strictly to the specification are rather limited. Each site has also implemented it in a slightly different manner and extended it through a variety of other APIs which allow more comprehensive and site-specific integration. In fact, it is entirely possible to create an application for MySpace that does not use anything related to OpenSocial.

Finally, from a developer’s or brand’s standpoint, these platforms are all still amazing opportunities to leverage the existing membership and services of popular networks to develop a large user base with relatively less effort and shorter time than other methods.

¹ Visitors in millions for March and annual growth from Nielsen Online as reported by Mashable.

² From April 22, by viewing sites’ app directories.

Instead reality set in quite quickly after the platform launched and the much vaunted openness of the social graph allowed it to become a morass of zombie hugs and super pokes with dozens of invites and notices filling every home page. People began ignoring them outright and these things became running gags about how much useless garbage was on Facebook. Even MySpace, the poster child of glitter text and webcam girl invites, differentiated itself from Facebook when it announced its platform, claiming it would “avoid the feed spam issues that have plagued ‘other players in the space’”.

Unfortunately, the letter of new policy still allows forced invites; users just have to be told about them upfront and given a way out rather than ambushed and trapped. And various technical limitations won’t change the essence of the types of applications that become popular.

What are the things that are popular on Facebook and likely will be on other platforms and social networks? They are difficult to categorize, but some successful characteristics can be identified:

• Things that facilitate cool self-expression or personal representation
• Things that help pass time in an entertaining way
• Things that help people flirt or hookup
• Things with vaguely illicit or titillating content
• Things that leverage the fan base of something already popular

So given a blank slate, it’s kind of easy to pick two or three and combine them into something with mass appeal: send naughty pokes to friends, put favorite sports teams logos on your profile, play a knock-off of well-known game.

Legal rights and ethical issues aside, the challenge is that the application landscape on Facebook is now very crowded. It was one thing for these types of apps to spread virally when there were a few hundred and no limitations on communication with users and quite another when then are over 16,000 and tight restrictions.

A key question now when developing a new app is whether to try to gain the more difficult mass appeal or to create something more tightly targeted to a smaller, but perhaps more loyal and relevant user base. This is especially pertinent to applications created as part of marketing for brands. Should an app provide utility directly related to a brand or should it be something only tangentially connected with the potential to reach more people?

Unfortunately, success on Facebook is currently primarily measured by total reach with more users always being better. This is what has led to the spam mess in the first place. Maybe with the new changes, there will be a trend towards an appreciation of quality over quantity. I certainly hope so.

Update:
All Facebook and TechCrunch have interesting articles on Facebook spam.

We see the potential here as being enormous, and are already hard at work integrating social applications into our clients’ word of mouth/social media marketing mix. We’ve just released our first app, called Pass the Soccer Ball.

The premise is quite simple – you pass ‘balls’ to your friends who can in turn either pass it down the field to one of their friends or take a ‘shot’ at the goal (with each successive pass improving the odds of scoring a goal). The very nature of the game takes advantage of the “social graph” and spreads virally. In fact, we quietly released the first version of the application last week with no promotion and over 1000 people installed the app in just the first few days (it also boasts an “active user” base in the top 15% of all Facebook apps, according to Adonomics).

This is a sign of bigger things to come, as Myspace, Yahoo, and even Google are rumored to follow suit and release developer APIs that allow deep integration with their platforms. Social networks are becoming the new operating systems

Got a Facebook account? Why not check out the app and pass me a soccer ball?

Related Links:

Facebook Developers API
Pass the Soccer Ball Game (Facebook account required)