Appaholic: Tracking FaceBook Apps

I think I just found my new best friend. I've been playing around with Appaholic, a website that lets you compare usage statistics for all the new FaceBook applications. The site will manufacture three types of comparative graphs and provide embed codes for you to paste into your website. Here's what I've been looking at:

Total Number of Users

This is measuring the total number of users for the Causes application, the Change.org application, and Top Friends - the most popular application on FaceBook. It sort of puts into context just how much political organizing is actually happening on the site. Playful applications that add functionality to member profiles are massively more popular than any kind of organizing.

It also holds true for the candidate applications:

Total Number of Users

It also looks like Obama might be hitting something of a plateau in terms of the use of his application (I removed Change.org because it's explosive growth rate in the last two weeks would obscure the trend). His number of supporters continues to grow at a healthy rate, but those new users aren't using the application, begging the question "how much are they really doing for the candidate online?

Growth Rate

Here's one more comparing the number of users per hour on the Obama, Edwards, and Change.org application (which supports candidates as well):

Number of Users Per Hour

I wonder if it wouldn't benefit the candidates to throw their weight behind Change.org rather than their own applications. In the coming weeks, they will be able to raise money through it, associate themselves with issues, form online communities, link video - functionality well beyond what is currently available in their own applications. Plus, as the numbers show, the community of users is just way way larger.

One caveat about these graphs - the data all lags one week behind actual numbers. Still, a really useful tool and I'm sure I'll be using it in the future to talk about growth and usage rates of Change.org, Causes, Candidate Apps, and any other online organizing tools that employ the F8 platform.