Platypus update

by Josh Fraser on June 21, 2007

This is what happens when Facebook adds your application to their directory:

Here is a quick summary of the other numbers from the Platypus experiment:

  • 416 people have looked at it
  • 227 people have installed it
  • 158 people are currently using it
  • 69 people (30%) installed it and then removed it again

The biggest surprise to me with these numbers is the low retention rate. Why am I loosing 30% of the people who install my application? Has anyone else noticed this trend with their Facebook applications?

Comments

  1. Doug Williams said at 8:15 pm on June 21st, 2007:

    I have written my thoughts at http://igudo.wordpress.com/2007/06/19/fickle-facebook-friends/

  2. Fadi said at 2:39 pm on June 22nd, 2007:

    I think one of the reasons you have a low retention rate is that the data rarely changes, and never dramatically. It’s just static information, which a person only really needs once.

  3. Justin said at 5:33 am on June 25th, 2007:

    I installed it and uninstalled it because it didn’t work (for me). I’ll try it again.

  4. joshfraz said at 6:59 pm on June 25th, 2007:

    Justin,
    Sorry that you are having problems with Platypus. You’re not alone. Other people have been having problems too.

    There are a couple things that are causing the application to time out:

    1) the application is very computationally intensive and the server often times out before it is finished calculating everything.

    2) Facebook’s query language (FQL) does not support the COUNT() function. This means that instead of it returning an integer value for my query, it returns ALL the data and I have to loop through and count it out myself. Needless to say, this isn’t very efficient and it definitely doesn’t help the timeout issue!

    Sorry you’re having problems. I hope you keep trying. It usually works on the second try.

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