Quality Social Network Application Metrics

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=147145

by russw • 18 years ago

2 3 18 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

As a developer of SocNet apps I'm looking past simply launching the services and trying now to understand best practices of tracking and valuing user interaction with the apps. Thoughts?

dbreunig2• 18 years ago

Yes!!! I've been working on this recently and would love to start a conversation on the topic...

Pageviews isn't something that works consistently across apps. For example, let's look at WarBook and Scrabbulous. Scrabbulous is killing WarBook in installs and Daily Actives, but probably sees significantly less pageviews than WarBook.

My current thinking is an attempt to measure the virality of a given app, basing my thoughts around the Net Promoter score ("Would you recommend this to a friend?"). This can be assessed easily if you're working with paid media. Your click-thru to install can be compared against total installs, inferring your social install number.

If we can measure this number against Daily Actives versus time we could potentially ascertain the longevity of this app (are users installing, passing it on and then never playing again? or do they play for a month or two? forever?).

Thoughts, feedback, comments?

russw• 18 years ago

I like where you are going, trying to define the role of the "connections" an app has vs page views. Do you think there are differences in the value of a given network? For example with the Myspace container you can only show ads in the "canvas" view which is a secondary view to the top views.

How can we define time I wonder? this seems like its potentially misleading, as a flash game may get more time but I'm not engaging in an act of connection to an ad or other revenue opp.

Churn is really important, like the cell phone co's its key to know how long you can maintain a users mindshare.

dbreunig2• 18 years ago

I'd define time as days installed, largely because it's easy to measure and a good common denominator. Especially since FB has chosen Daily Active Users as their king metric.

Quality Social Network Application Metrics

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