O'Reilly Research has just released a new report on The Facebook Application Platform, and Tim O'Reilly has commented on the Long Tail aspects. He writes:
The good news has already been widely disseminated: there are nearly 5000 Facebook applications, and the top applications have tens of millions of installs and millions of active users. The bad news, alas, is in our report: 87% of the usage goes to only 84 applications! Only 45 applications have more than 100,000 active users. This is a long tail marketplace with a vengeance -- but unfortunately, the economic models (for developers at least, though not for Facebook itself) all rely on getting into the very short head.
But read the discussion as well. In some repects, it's more interesting than the post....
