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While social networking applications were all the rage last year, backlash ensued in 2008 as users got inundated with app invites and a seemingly never-ending supply of apps with little utility. To a large extent, Facebook’s re-design was actually an attempt to de-clutter the site from the mess that had been created with the developer platform.
Despite the user pushback, a number of application providers saw tremendous success in the past year. Companies like Slide, RockYou, and Playfish now have user counts in the tens of millions, while Facebook began making investments of its own in promising ideas through its fbFund. We also saw the launch of several new platforms like MySpace, LinkedIn, Friendster, and hi5 , just to name a few, all of which now support applications from third-party developers.
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Widget platform Clearspring turned some heads last month when it said that it would have reach equivalent to the “7th largest web property” following its acquisition of AddThis, a provider of widgets that enable easy social bookmarking from blogs and Web pages. Today, new data from comScore shows that while Clearspring’s reach is indeed huge, another player in the space – Gigya – is actually reaching a few million more eyeballs every month worldwide.
According to data from August 2008, Gigya reached 174 million unique widget viewers worldwide for the month, compared to 160 million for Clearspring. Slide sits in 3rd with 154 million viewers, with other competitors running significantly behind the top three (however, it should be noted that RockYou was not included in the report). In the US, Clearspring holds a slight lead over Gigya: 71.1 million viewers compared to 70.3 million, respectively. Those numbers might swing back into Clearspring’s favor soon though, since the AddThis acquisition is not yet included in the comScore report.
In any event, what’s responsible for the huge reach of the widget providers would largely seem to be the placement of widgets on social networking sites, where Gigya says that the average widget is viewed by 25 different people. While those numbers are big, the reach of widgets isn’t quite an apples-to-apples comparison with the page views racked up by leading Web properties like Google, Yahoo, and MSN because they aren’t nearly as easy to monetize yet.
However, Gigya (as well as other optimistic companies in the space I’ve spoke with recently) see this changing. The company cites recent Forrester research and says that “with 83 percent of people trusting a friend’s opinion of a product or service, widgets, and their ability to reach friend networks as user-endorsed content, represent an important marketing opportunity.“ Gigya launched its own ad network earlier this year to begin addressing this opportunity, while Clearspring and Widgetbox have their own offerings too.
On the other hand, a global slowdown in advertising could obviously put a major dent in these plans, especially if advertisers prove reluctant to try less proven formats like widgets. Additionally, it’s to-be-determined how users will respond to increasingly obtrusive ads being placed in their widgets – especially if the brands represented don’t necessarily mix with their personal tastes.
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After attracting nearly 20 million active users, what does the application formerly known as FunWall on Facebook do for an encore? Add professional content from the likes of CBS, NBC, and Warner Bros, according to The Wall Street Journal. The application’s creator – Slide – has signed a deal with a number of media companies that will allow users of FunSpace to embed clips of various TV shows on their friend’s profiles.
While the deal doesn’t include full-length shows, it will make recommendations based on the number of times a video is posted to people’s profiles. Of course, you could already embed YouTube videos using FunSpace, so plenty of professionally produced copyright content can already find its way onto the service, at least until YouTube deals with it on their end.
Nonetheless, given many user’s penchant for forwarding video clips to friends, FunSpace’s deal with the media companies should make it easier for them to do so, at least within the walls of Facebook. And for the content producers, Slide’s massive reach on Facebook should provide yet another vehicle to monetize their video online.
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Slide, the ever popular widget and social application maker, spent the last week repairing its Facebook-friendly Top Friends application after having seen it suspended by the social network abruptly late last month. Now it is back in business.
The problem attributed to the Top Friends application was a hole which allowed things like birthday, gender, and relationship data to be exposed to the editing whims of strangers. According to Elinor Mills of CNET, the exploit was first noted by a computer technician of Vancouver, Canada, and drove Facebook to take it down soon thereafter.
One of the most prominent application developers that specializes in fast and user-friend media sharing and the general enhancement of networking profiles, Slide’s trouble the past week has naturally been noted to great extent within the blog world. Has a 7-8 day checkout caused it any long-lasting bruises as a result? I venture to say no, for the simple fact that its software catalog is quite a bit larger than Top Friends alone.
Nonetheless, if any other stories raising privacy and security concerns come about in the near term, and Slide is determined to be the source, the business might sustain some losses on the user front. (Chief competitor RockYou likely shed no tears for its rival the past several days as it worked to right this clear wrong.)
Slide has made it a point in recent weeks to focus less on expanding its supply of social applications and more on the making the best of the bunch better still.
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Slide’s SuperPoke! seems to be the marketing tool of choice, especially for MTV Networks. After the success of the Juno Pregnancy SuperPoke!, MTV Network’s VH1 is now teaming up with Slide for the “I Love Money SuperPoke!Fest.” This is a gap-bridging promotion between online and on-air mediums, where a SuperPoke! on Facebook or MySpace has a chance of appearing on television. The promo will run here on VH1’s website.
Starting Wednesday July 2nd, a day before the marathons of “Rock of Love,” “I Love New York,” and “Flavor of Love” on VH1, randomly selected super pokes will appear on the related television programs. The selection for pokes are pretty wide; there are 30 different VH1-branded actions like “get romantic with” someone for the Flavor of Love show, or “throw some tongue” at someone for the “Rock of Love” show.
The online-to-on-air process won’t leave you completely in the dark — the lottery method will be used to pick SuperPoke! users to appear on-air, and you’ll be notified of your upcoming television “appearance.” Just your name and the name of your SuperPoke! recipient will appear along the bottom of the screen, accompanied by an animation of the SuperPoke! action that’s taking place.
This is an interesting method for getting users to not only become more interactive around a particular television program, but it enables VH1 to use a tactic that could actually result in more television viewers. If you know your SuperPoke! is going to appear soon on VH1, you’ll probably tune in, and tell your friends to tune in as well. I doubt I’ll be watching much of the marathon programs myself, but I am interested to find out how will this will work towards combining marketing on a cross-platform basis.
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Wow, this is tough for one of the biggest Facebook application developers, Slide. Their hugely popular application Top Friends simply…vanished.
As reported by Inside Facebook, the Top Friends application page redirects to Facebook home page; it’s not visible in profile pages, and searching for it yields no results.
This could be a temporary glitch or a deliberate action from Facebook. Both are bad for anyone that considers basing their business model on a Facebook application. If it’s some sort of temporary bug, it’s bad because a glitch can erase your entire app from existence. If it’s deliberate action from Facebook, it’s bad because there was no notice on such an action, and everyone - the users as well as Slide - have been left high and dry with one sweep from mighty Facebook. We’ll have more as the story unfolds.
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In an interview published this morning in the Financial Times, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said he wouldn’t be looking to pick up any other Internet companies just because the Yahoo deal failed. One can only imagine how far shares of Facebook would have plummeted on that comment had the social networking site been publicly traded. Ditto for Slide and RockYou, both of whom recently raised money at lofty valuations.
“People don’t understand what they’re talking about,” Ballmer told the FT. “At the end of the day, this is about the ad platform. This is not about just any one of the applications.” And for Microsoft, according to the interview, the primary ad platform is search. That makes sense as search is a billion-dollar, proven business.
Application companies have some ad revenue, but right now they’re kind of like cable channels for the web, while an ad platform is the means to a business model that supports that cable channel. Microsoft wants to own the keys to the business model. So to prove their worth, it’s time for application developers to prove their business model.
Last month’s news that RockYou had raised $1M from DCM in “interim funding” seemed a bit odd in light of some of the other huge financings we’ve seen of late in the widget and social networking application space. Today, the picture becomes a whole lot clearer, as we’ve learned that RockYou has in fact closed its own massive funding deal: a $35 million Series C round, led by DCM.
RockYou is using the funding as an opportunity to share some numbers from its network, which ranges from Facebook applications like Super Wall to MySpace apps like Graffiti. In total, RockYou says its network now reaches 87.5 million people each month, who in turn generate 2.7 billion page views. 
The company also points out that it’s not just a Facebook app developer: more than 10 million applications have now been installed on the relatively new MySpace, hi5, and Orkut platforms.
With the funding, RockYou now turns its attention to monetizing all of those eyeballs. The company already has its own ad network on Facebook, and plans to expand its online advertising options with several new services over the coming months. RockYou did not elaborate on those plans, but engagement-based advertising seems likely given other developments we’ve seen recently from companies like Meebo and VideoEgg.
The big round also gives RockYou one of the deepest warchests in its market, where we’ve already seen a host of other companies raise big money this year. RockYou’s chief rival Slide raised $50M in January, Gigya added $9.5 to its arsenal in March, and Clearspring picked up $18M last month.
While investors clearly remain bullish on social networking platforms and applications, some recent developments show that users may not be. US-based traffic at both MySpace and Facebook declined in April, while our readers have hinted at serious application fatigue in polls we’ve posted here on Mashable. Facebook is actually re-designing its user profiles to reduce the clutter that the application platform has created.
That said, now that the land grab is mostly over, it would appear that the money is now flowing into the companies with massive scale like RockYou and Slide, who are now shifting their focus to making money. Over the weekend, Slide actually indicated that they would no longer be launching new Facebook applications, but rather focusing on improving the quality of the one’s they already have. Beyond that, we’ll likely see further consolidation in the space, with smaller developers with successful applications being scooped up by the top players looking to maintain their dominant market share.
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RockYou, the maker of applications such as SuperWall and Likeness that ride on top of social networks, has raised $35 million in a round of venture funding lead by DCM. We confirmed with a company spokesperson that previous investors Partech, Lightspeed and Sequoia participated in the round. San Mateo, Calif.-based RockYou had previously raised $10-15 million, she said, though she declined to confirm a specific amount.
The $35 million likely brings RockYou’s valuation under fellow widget maker Slide’s, which was $550 million in its last $50 million round from two private equity funds. It’s also less than a reported $50-$70 million on a $400 million valuation that RockYou was supposedly seeking. An insider spun this difference in valuation with Slide as a positive thing, though, telling us it would make RockYou a more digestible acquisition target.
Competition is fierce between the companies; in our experience it’s impossible to interview RockYou CEO Lance Tokuda without him carrying on about Slide. Though some of his points seem valid — Slide execs have admitted some of their products and features were inspired by competing with RockYou. However Slide has CEO Max Levchin’s impeccable PayPal pedigree, whereas RockYou’s founding was tied up in a lawsuit claiming that Tokuda and cofounder Jia Shen stole the idea from their former employer Iconix (it was settled out of court).
RockYou says it has 87.5 million monthly uniques and 2.7 billion page views across its network. It’s impressive reach, but along with that comes impressive infrastructure costs. The company’s justification for the new funding isn’t terribly specific — it said it wants to hire, expand advertising and publisher offerings, and add more applications (BTW Slide apparently said it’s done adding new Facebook applications). In terms of anticipating and fine-tuning what it’s audience wants from its products, I’d give RockYou the upper hand, but making money may take a different skill set. The plan is “building brand awareness and loyalty” by tapping into engaged young users.
Slide has already done plenty of horizontal on Facebook. Now it’s going more the way of vertical. Or at least more so than it has over the past few years.
Slide has for some time put itself forth as “better than the rest” in many respects. It’s chief competitor of seasons past, RockYou, has even publicly allowed that Max Levchin’s primary devotion offers extra layers of refinement, visual and/or technical, over its own devices. (RockYou however does peg Slide to be a sieve of its original ideas, a claim laid out in Sarah Lacy’s recently-published portrayal of the Web 2.0 space, “Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good,” a book which, despite its redundancies, is connects some dots in rather interesting ways.)
But Levchin, along with fellow execs, including Keith Rabois, VP of strategy and business development, evidently sees the need to bring it up a notch. A big notch. The company is now intent to start making significantly more cash from the four-year-old project. How so? 
They’ll be putting the brakes on producing lots of new widgets, and focus on the stuff that has caught on in a big way on Facebook and find ways to open the financial taps that much more.
Vasanth Sridharan of Silicon Alley Insider questions the logic of this shift, asking whether Rabois’s view that “the great Facebook app landgrab … is over” clashes with the idea of “unlimited real estate in cyberspace.” I would have to answer with a view fixed somewhere in the center. Yes, there is only so much world-is-flat development that can occur without building the marketplace to such an extent that much of what is created resides in relative obscurity. But there’s still a window open for new folk to build nifty stuff that could potentially do some competitive damage to Slide’s business. The market’s not full by any means. If anything, we’ll see laggards drop by the wayside and fresh faces join the march forward.
Yes, some redesigns at Facebook will make it tougher for some to get the fast-paced viral umph that Slide has been able to enjoy for north of a year now. But those changes could well affect the fortunes of Slide, too, despite its solid market presence. So, if new developers prove willing and able to build “awesomeness,” it’s all a wash.
In all, because the company has built its business to the point of having some mighty good staying power, it can focus on those applications - on Facebook, at least - which it deems its brightest stars. Seems sensible, no?
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