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by the apps’ developers (you can pick yours by editing the About Page for your application), so keep in mind that this is a somewhat arbitrary and self-imposed categorization. If you’ve been using Facebook for some time, you probably won’t be surprised to discover that the Just for Fun category has almost seven times more apps than the second biggest, Gaming. In fact, more Rain Man-like readers may have casually noticed that the list just shown adds up to 24,153 apps, even though at the time the official count sat at 16,409 (over 24,000 now). What gives? Since it’s a little ambiguous whether your meticulously crafted “Go Fish” challenge should go in Gaming or Just for Fun, and since Facebook allows developers to pick up to two categories per app, you might as well stick it in both and be part of the 7,744 phantom duplicated app listings.

Which Apps Are Most Popular?

Problem

Riding onto the Platform battlefield means taking on over 26,000 opponents. Sun Tzu once said:

Know thy self, know thy enemy. A thousand battles, a thousand victories.

Anyone can take on a thousand battles, but 26,000? That takes real courage. How can I possibly know thine enemy when there are so damn many of them?

Solution

You’re probably wishing that someone had gone out and built some kind of thing that would tell you which apps have the most installs or active users. If that’s true, it must be your lucky day! A few different people have done exactly that. There are two solutions with two very different approaches:

SocialMedia’s Appsaholic

You can either install the Appsaholic Facebook application (http://apps.facebook.com/appsaholic) or register for an account on http://www.socialmedia.com and then use the web application. (If you’re doing any work on Bebo or OpenSocial, go for the web version because it can track apps on all platforms.)

Deft Labs’ AppHound

AppHound is available as a Facebook app (http://apps.facebook.com/apphound).

Discussion

Either one of those apps will help peel back the curtain and give you a glimpse into the sometimes bizarre world of Facebook app popularity. They won’t, of course, tell you what made each of the apps as popular as it is, but they will help you develop an understanding of the kinds of apps people install, what motivates them to keep the app after installation, and general trends rippling their way across the Platform landscape.

Appsaholic (see Figure 2-1) has been around a lot longer than AppHound and is the basis for the so-called SocialMedia app network, which SocialMedia created to help developers track, monetize, and advertise their software. All of this is done through the sale and purchase of advertising spots on the Canvas pages of other apps, with the general idea being the creation of a marketplace in which developers effectively trade users back and forth. Using the calculator on its site (http://www.socialmedia.com/market), as of this writing, if your average user referred 1.25 additional users and you went through 10 levels of referrals, you could buy 8,513,225 new users for $50,000 (or $0.006/user). If you were able to sustain a 10% daily active rate (i.e., 10% of your users use your app every day), you would rank fifth on today’s Top Apps scale. More realistically, if you saved yourself a doughnut and spent $5,000, you could buy (surprise!) 851,322 users, which might give you 8,513 dailies for a ranking in the top 1,000 apps.

AppHound might be more your cup of tea if you’re not looking to monetize your app and just want a better understanding of the market. The user interface is simpler to navigate and it allows you to define “trackers,” which are basically notifications when specified events occur (e.g., when your application’s daily usage grows by more than 5%). An example screenshot of the AppHound Facebook app is shown in Figure 2-2.

Once you’ve decided what to build, you should jump into AppHound and add trackers for all the apps you consider competitive. Let’s say you are going to write a quiz game and want to get a sense of how the genre is making out. Using