Best 5 Facebook Applications Announced Today, No One Throwing Sheep Finally
by
on December 09, 2008,
Of course there can be different approaches to determining best something in a group of similar items. So we can choose different criteria to determine which Facebook applications are the best: number of users, number of active users, users voting or whatever. But I think when an application’s developers are given a huge amount of money to continue its development, it can also be considered as a good indication of the quality of the application.
Earlier today Facebook has announced winners in the second round of its fbFund competition where startups contested for a chance of winning the grant prize of $225,000. There were a total of 25 startups - all of them were the winners of the first round of the competition (which brought each of them $25,000 to help develop the application). Facebook users also had a chance to have their say in who should win by voting for their favorite applications and this partly determined the top 5 selected today. So here are the 5 lucky (or hard-working?) winners:
GroupCard (164 thousand monthly active users)
GroupCard is an application that allows a group of friends to create a joint digital card that will have a contribution from each of the people participating in the group - be it text, uploaded photos or audio files or money to buy a gift. This card can actually be printed or sent in digital form to whoever it is intended for on any occasion.
Kontagent is an analytics service to application developers as it allows them to evaluate viral effects for the application on a social networking platform (Facebook is currently the only one supported with support for MySpace and OpenSocial also promised on their site) and see how good it performs and how people interact with it. This sounds like the most serious of all applications as it provides apps developers with detailed analytics on usage - and enables them to eventually improve the application based on the feedback collected.
MouseHunt (251 thousand monthly active users)
MouseHunt is a game where every player is a hunter hired by the king to hunt the mice that infects his kingdom. The players compete for the title of the best MouseHunter in the land.
Wedding book (368 thousand monthly active users)
As the name suggests, Wedding book is an application that is intended for those planning a wedding. Basically Wedding book is a social network in a social network as it unites all the people getting ready for a wedding on Facebook and allows them to share advice, tips, and help in the preparation and planning.
Wildfire relies on consumers’ natural desire to find the best bargains and freebies available as it allows companies to create their viral promotion campaigns by offering giveaways and sweepstakes while consumers will be able to discover such campaigns, communicate with the companies and get the desired things for free.
Each winning application gets the $250,000 in funding, mentorship from Facebook on development, working on the social network’s platform and even marketing support. I think it is quite visible that all the applications selected are more or less useful (anyone sees anything about throwing sheep?) and some either have a solid business model (Rafe Needleman explains that MouseHunt makes over $100,000 a month on selling virtual cheese to hunters for real money) or at least show signs of how they will make money (Wildfire is in a limited invite-only mode for now but when launched publicly they promise to start charging companies for arranging viral promotion campaigns for them).
I was more than disappointed to realize that none of the winners made it to my personal list as I don’t have any of the applications installed. What’s more, I can hardly imagine hunting mice so some of these very best apps will hardly get my attention anyway. It is strange that somehow these selected applications never hit my Facebook inbox with an invitation from a friend while the constant “I sold you for…” seem to always be there. So I am more than happy not to see anything that is unreasonable and has no real value or chances to make money in the list of top 5 finalists selected by Facebook and the users - looks like we have started to realize apps need value to be good.
