Ben Rattray must have had one heck of a release timeframe since he’s just e-mailed me at 4:55 AM his time to tell me that change.org has just released on Facebook. His hard work has produced one of the slicker integrations I’ve seen out there in the Facebook apps world. Almost everything change.org has is implemented within Facebook. The only thing missing (and soon to be added) is the “Actions” portion of change.org where you can:
- Start email campaigns targeted at your state or national representatives
- Organize volunteer events and rallies
- Make committments with friends to help advance change in your daily lives
One nice thing about change.org on Facebook is that you’re given the option to synchronize your previous change.org work with the Facebook app. It immediately picked up my previous activity on change.org and listed it on the Facebook app. Very nice!
So, the challenge is finally laid down. Will the change.org app have the same virality as the Causes app? Is there a first mover advantage for Project Agape that will make it difficult to dislodge in the Facebook system? For those of you keeping score, the change.org app has 48 users and the Causes app has 1,306,588 users. What will it look like a month from now?
What do you think? Please leave your comments below.
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Thanks for the post Allan. I still haven’t gone to bed, although I feel like I’m sleepwalking at this point
Unfortunately I can say with near certainty that we won’t be matching the same wild growth of the few dozen applications that had early access to the Facebook Platform, Causes among them. The primary reason for the viral growth of these applications was the ability for people to send private messages to all of their friends at once inviting them to the service, which drove the applications exponentially. However, Facebook dramatically curtailed this just about a week ago and now only allows users to invite up to 10 friends a day to an application. (Most users on Facebook have several hundred friends.) This more or less eliminates the possibility of going viral based simply on mathematics. (Since only a small % of people invite their friends and a small % of those accept, you need numbers much larger than 10 invites to really go viral.) In fact, if you look at the few hundred applications submitted in the last week or so, only a handful have more than 10,000 users, showing the dramatic decline in growth.
Nonetheless, I think in the long run the inital explosive growth of users is going to be less relevant than it currently seems. Either way, I think it’s important for all of us – Change.org, Project Agape, and others – to keep our eyes on the real goal at hand: not just acquiring new users, but translating that into deep, long-term engagement in social issues and with organizations.
Actually, I DID invite all my friends to the Change.org app and it just let it through. It didn’t ask me to invite ten at a time. I wonder if approved apps have that regulator turned off.
I give credit to Change for making the gutsy decision to invest time and effort into building a Facebook app, given that Causes already has a one month/1.2M user lead and a very similar, if not the same, service.
Given their similarity and reliance on growing a network of supporters, it seems like this will be a winner-take-all market. In any case, competition is healthy so may the best app win, even if Causes is way out in front now.