Adding application ratings to Facebook Applications

I have a few Facebook applications which have a modest number of users (Easter Egg, Four Secrets, One Lie and My Days) and it started to annoy me that Facebook does not have a way for users to rate applications.

Well, now they do.

A Free Service

I've put together a little service that allows any Facebook application developer to have their app rated by users and display the rating on their application's About Page. To see how this works take a look at the About Page for My Days. At the bottom there's a section where the current application rating is shown, and the user is given the chance to vote on the app.

All the voting takes place on my server, and I've managed to create HTML that the About Page will accept that dynamically updates the voting as people vote.

Adding rating to an application's About Page

If you have a Facebook application and want to have voting on your app., then simply add the follow HTML to the app. About Page text at the bottom:

<hr>
Rating: <div style="height: 16px; width: 85px; background-image: url(http://l8tr.org/ratings/rating.php); background-repeat: no-repeat"></div>
Rate this app: <a href="http://l8tr.org/ratings/rate.php?r=1">1 star</a>, <a href="http://l8tr.org/ratings/rate.php?r=2">2 stars</a>, <a href="http://l8tr.org/ratings/rate.php?r=3">3 stars</a>, <a href="http://l8tr.org/ratings/rate.php?r=4">4 stars</a>, <a href="http://l8tr.org/ratings/rate.php?r=5">5 stars</a>

Here's what that looks like when the About Page is shown:

Adding rating to an application's Canvas Page

To add app rating to the Canvas Page of your application (so that users can rate from within the app) you add the following HTML:

<hr />
Rating: <div style="height: 16px; width: 85px; background-image: url(http://l8tr.org/ratings/rating.php?app_id=YOUR_APP_ID); background-repeat: no-repeat"></div>
Rate this app: <a href="http://l8tr.org/ratings/rate.php?r=1&app_id=YOUR_APP_ID">1 star</a>, <a href="http://l8tr.org/ratings/rate.php?r=21&app_id=YOUR_APP_ID">2 stars</a>, <a href="http://l8tr.org/ratings/rate.php?r=31&app_id=YOUR_APP_ID">3 stars</a>, <a href="http://l8tr.org/ratings/rate.php?r=41&app_id=YOUR_APP_ID">4 stars</a>, <a href="http://l8tr.org/ratings/rate.php?r=51&app_id=YOUR_APP_ID">5 stars</a>

Replacing YOUR_APP_ID with the application ID (i.e. the number on the app's About Page) of your application.

View the top applications

Anyone can view the top applications by clicking this link.

Warning to fraudsters

A note for fraudsters: behind the scenes I'm monitoring how the voting is taking place and where the links are coming from, even how they were inserted. Don't mess with this, or risk having your application blacklisted. It would be a pity if trying to game the system resulted in your application's rating disappearing completely :-)

Last push for POPFile voting

POPFile has been nominated for a SourceForge Community Choice Award due to the efforts of many people.

Voting closes on July 20 and there's strong competition in POPFile's category from the likes of Pidgin (formerly GAIM) and phpBB.

If POPFile wins SourceForge will be making a donation to a charity that I picked: Doctors without Borders.

If you feel like voting for POPFile, please vote in the Best Project for Communications category here:

http://sourceforge.net/awards/cca/vote.php

Stop me before I code again: another Facebook application

I woke up with a brainstorm and I just had to implement it. You may remember the Five Things meme that was going around the blogosphere a while back. I thought it would be fun to have something similar on Facebook, but with a little twist: one of the things is a lie.

So, I created the Four Secrets, One Lie application which lets you post five things people don't know about you, one of which is untrue. The application randomizes the order and places them on your Facebook profile page.

To make it interesting for the visitor you can click on each secret to discover whether it's true or not.

Here's my current set of Four Secrets, One Lie:

* John is a qualified SCUBA diver.
* John is a closet Meatloaf fan.
* John plays the drums in French Meatloaf tribute band "Pain de Veau"
* John speaks French very well.
* John thinks Neve Campbell is just perfect.

I have just one more idea for a Facebook application and then I'd better stop coding these things, it's getting addictive.

So, I built a Facebook application: Easter Egg

I've been playing with Facebook for a little over a week and I couldn't resist trying out the Facebook Platform. To be honest despite the missing documentation and changing APIs, they've done a nice job.

My first attempt at an application took a little over 3 hours and is called Easter Egg. It lets you leave Easter Eggs on your profile that only certain visitors can see. So, for example, you could leave a little love note for your girlfriend, or details of a secret party for your buddies, or just say Hi! when your Mom visits. And here's a screen shot:



If you are a Facebook user and like that sort of thing you can add Easter Egg.

Please vote for POPFile

POPFile has been nominated for a SourceForge Community Choice Award through the efforts of its users.

Now it's time to vote.

If you love POPFile, please vote for it in the Best Project for Communications category.

The Long Tail of Facebook Applications

Lately, I've been developing a little application using the Facebook Platform (my Easter Egg and Four Secrets, One Lie application) and I started wondering about the statistics surrounding Facebook applications. So, a little WWW::Mechanize application later here's some facts that are true today:

1. There are 1,225 Facebook applications available in the Facebook directory.

2. There are 73,109,074 installed applications in Facebook users' profiles.

3. Hence the average application has about 59700 users.

The problem with the average is that it hides a savage reality of Facebook applications: some have many users, most have almost none. To analyze that I broke the data logarithmically counting the number of applications with greater than 1,000,000, 100,000, 10,000, 1,000, 100, 10 and 0 users.

At least X users	Total applications	Percent of total
10	274	22%
100	492	40%
1000	290	24%
10000	110	9%
100000	38	3%
1000000	21	2%

So, 86% of applications on Facebook have less than 10,000 users, with 62% having less than 1,000 users. The 'big applications' (with over 100,000 users) account for 5% of all the applications, and only 2% make it over 1,000,000 users. So for most people developing a Facebook applications means very, very few users.

Graphing that you get a classic Long Tail picture:



The top 21 applications (over 1,000,000 users are):

Application	Total users
Top Friends	7,490,104
iLike	4,217,171
Fortune Cookie	4,107,451
Graffiti	4,085,170
Horoscopes	3,892,656
X Me	3,628,523
SuperPoke!	3,351,597
Free Gifts	3,106,403
Video	3,063,761
Movies	2,775,538
Moods	2,186,767
Mobile	1,954,245
Honesty Box	1,904,742
My Questions	1,556,722
Favorite Peeps!	1,459,334
Food Fight!	1,387,109
Causes	1,283,009
Quizzes	1,234,102
Slideshows	1,216,217
HOT or NOT	1,138,625
Where I've Been	1,027,373

Another way to examine the Facebook data is to ask who the most prolific authors are. The top most profilic authors are:

Author	User count
Goowy Media	10	6,248
Astrology.com	9	8,459
Sze Tan	8	3,670
Patrick Shyu	8	27,621
Kevin Koder	8	230,164
Pete Crucian	7	503
Lucy Silverman	7	1,180
Sari Williams	6	599
Zach Smith	6	19,397
James Tyler	6	487

Only Kevin Koder (with 230,164 users spread of 8 applications) is anywhere near being a 'top application' on Facebook. Kevin's top application is Family Guy Quotes.

The top 10 authors by number of users are:

Author	Total user
Slide	7490357
RockYou!	5108967
Facebook	5018170
Jia Shen	4583310
R. Tyler Ballance	4556234
iLike	4217269
Ted Suzman	4085317
Nikil Gandhy	3351734
Zachary Allia	3107219
Flixster	2775591

Unsurprisingly Facebook is one of the most popular authors given their advantage of actually owning the site. Ignoring the companies on the list there are a few individuals who've hit the big time on Facebook. Whether that turns in to any money for them is another thing... but Facebook benefits from this Long Tail because the cost to them of the vast underbelly of barely used applications is close to 0: they don't even host those applications, you do.