Appflation

Speaking of apps that are built to encourage viral propagation ... which is, like, all of them ...

Check out Adonomics’ Leaderboard, a kind of billboard chart for Facebook applications (of which there are now more than 13,000 and growing rapidly). As of today, Facebook app cranker-outer Slide owns two of the top three spots with its FunWall and Top Friends apps. Top Friends, which mirrors an old MySpace feature by letting you pick your elite pals, has been installed by nearly 24 million users (for reference, the 10 most populous cities in the U.S. have about 24 million people combined).

RockYou’s Super Wall is a close second, with 22 million users and a valuation of $26 million, according to Adonomics’ criteria, which factor in number of installs and active users in deciding an app’s potential to generate advertising revenue.

Mess around with any of Adonomics' top five and you'll see that proselytizing to new users is not just a central feature of these apps but indeed feels like the primary purpose. (The most blatant example of a Ponzi app is Hot Potato, which asks you to pass a virtual hot potato to as many new friends as possible (each one, of course, needs to install the app in order to pass the potato to the next poor fellow who needs to install the app to pass the potato).

"Invite more friends to improve (y)our popularity!" shouts Top Friends. Parens mine.

But with all this promiscuous app-passing, much of which is fueled by new Facebook users who don't know any better, could the popularity of the most viral apps be a sort of subprime app bubble?  Despite the top apps' huge user bases, if Facebookers come to associate them with junk and fakery — the Wikipedia entry on "chain letter" already singles out Super Wall and FunWall — the apps are not invulnerable.  Facebook groups like "I HATE SUPERWALL/FUNWALL" already have thousands of irate members.

Jonathan Zittrain of Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, recently uninstalled Super Wall himself.  Facebook, he said, is bound by a rule that's affected other open online platforms that empower users to create their own applications — like the Web itself.

"The more open it is, the more successful it is," said Zittrain. "The more successful it is, the more vulnerable it is, which makes it less successful."

Zittrain said that there's a common challenge facing these open systems — Super Wall, FunWall and Facebook itself: "Can you survive your own success?"

— David Sarno