Poking Facebook: A Characterization of OSN Applications

Facebook is one of the most popular Internet sites today. A key feature that arguably contributed to Facebook’s unprecedented success is its application platform, which enables the development of third-party social-networking applications. Understanding how these applications are installed and used is important for the function and utility of web-based online social networks, e.g. to better engineer them and/or to design advertising campaigns. In this paper, we characterize the popularity and user reach of Facebook applications. We analyze application usage data gathered over a period of six months from Facebook and Adonomics a Facebook analytics service. We also crawl publicly accessible Facebook user profiles and obtain peruser application installation statistics, for approximately 300K users and 13.6K applications. Our findings include that (i) the popularity of Facebook applications has a highly skewed distribution; (ii) although the total number of application installations increases with time, the average user activity decreases; and (iii) users with more applications installed are more likely to install new applications.