iLike & Hangouts: a comparison of facebook widgets

Since May 2007, when Mark Zuckerberg announced Facebook’s transformation into an application development company, the number of applications available to Facebook users has grown at an impressive pace. Currently there are over 2,300 available with weekly additions. Facebook’s effort to create a platform for social networking widgets/application development seems to be working. How does this development opportunity translate into business opportunity for the widget creators, individual or company driven?

Currently there are over 2300 widgets on Facebook; the most popular are:

· Top Friends – manage your top 32 friends in your profile, by iSlide – 10M users

· Graffiti – lets you draw on your friend/s profiles – has 5.7M

· Video – by Facebook – a video publishing tool for your profile – 5.3M

· iLike – a place to share/purchase music, purchase concert tickets – 5.2M

· X me! – Rock You!’s tickle, poke(sending a nonverbal “hi”), etc. application – 4.8M

iLike & Hangouts: A comparison

iLike’s strategy of creating a deep connection with the user to encourage more transactions in the user’s profile space is working. Importantly, these transactions involve money. You can purchase songs and concert tickets via your personalized iLike ‘Canvas” page and receive recommendations on the information you feed it. A sense of community is supported in the musician/concert area in a number of ways. Users can post reviews of past concerts and linked profile photos of facebook users attending future concerts are shown. Even those who wish they could attend the featured concert are given page space – creating opportunity for members to interact with local music enthusiasts. iLike creates a number of “pages” within their application – Concerts, Free Mp3s, Challenge, and My Music, all built to encourage further use and community. This richness and detail, however, could not have been built for Facebook alone without significant time, investment and deep backend capabilities. As you may suspect, iLike has a fully functional website which was established before its presence on facebook. The music company leveraged existing content and backend power for widget development. Allowing the widget to grow on Facebook gives iLike an extended user base and information about the users they could not tap as effectively on their main site. This double pronged strategy allows iLike to continue building and capitalizing on both potential income streams.

In contrast, Hangouts, a widget interfacing with the website yelp, seems weak and watered down. There is only one main page, “Hangouts,” whose functionality is rather basic. It lists which users have gone out the most that month, who is going out tonight (both these are localized to an extent), your favorite spots you like to go and what you are doing that evening. While the widget can extract some data from Yelp’s site, there is the potential for much more if the two decide to join forces. I am sure some Facebook users are also yelp contributors – how about feeding that information over? Or provide the latest reviews by other yelp or Facebook users about places the user has listed as a favorite hangout? Restaurants could list their happy hours or special events that they are holding, or include reservation/invitation capabilities. Since Hangout was to be created by an individual developer and not yelp, the Hangouts widget is missing crucial elements of depth of content, increased personalization commitments and interaction functionality that would enhance its stickiness. While Hangouts provides some experience and data that is similar to yelp’s site, it does not, and cannot, fully support yelp’s business strategies and overall user experience. Perhaps yelp will take notice and purchase the widget, if it doesn’t have their own in the works. The trend seems to be that this potential treasure trove of information will need more than a lone developer to capitalize on it… Exit developer, enter supporting purchasing company/venture capitalist…