Facebook Developer Community Sees Decline

by dambridge | May 6, 2008 at 08:03 pm | 231 views | 2 comments

Well, this one feels like a validation of something we already knew was happening. Maybe some are tired of asking the question, 'has facebook jumped the shark?'. Makes you start looking for the slightest evidence of perspiration on the foreheads of the suits (ahem, sneakers) at corporate.

Something is wrong in the Facebook developer community. Starting in March I began noticing that the level of activity in the Facebook developers forum was dropping sharply.

Looking at five key metrics we'll see that the activity level of the Facebook forums is a fraction of what it was at the beginning of 2008. The number of active users1 has declined 27% since January, for example. And this is the best-performing metric discussed.

Furthermore, this decline in forum activity correlates to an overall decline in activity on the Facebook platform. Applications launched in early January were on average 1.5 times more successful than applications launched at the end of March.