Open platform: Entertainment business Circle, Information Circle, tool business Circle

Article Description: The long tail of apps: The three major business circles on the open platform.

Look at the picture first. This picture, I have been hand-painted many times in the company's in-house training. It was used on a recent mobile internet forum.

The three major business circles on the Open platform: entertainment business Circle, Information Circle, tool business Circle.

This picture is not very rigorous: it is not strictly comparable to the specific data of an open platform or application store. But I was looking at all the Open platforms (Apps). Or program, with the same below), tried to make out a visual representation. There should be some reference value.

In short, there are roughly three types of applications (APPS) on the Open Platform (Platform):

① Entertainment applications. games, in particular, are mainly social games on social platforms.
The main features of such applications are: Fast user growth, short life cycle, difficult operation and maintenance. generally speaking, the current open platform, active users TOP5 even TOP10 components or programs are almost all games. But "the King of Change", different games in contention for top position.

Next to the January 2011 Facebook component Rankings, most of them are games:

(Chart Data Source: AppData)

Someone asked me: Why is the game, especially the social games are so hot? Is it not normal for a game to be so popular on a social networking site? What does that mean?

In fact, when thinking about the above problems, many people's thinking is putting the cart before the horse.
Think about it: what is the social behavior of an ordinary person in real life? The answer to this question will help us understand a lot of problems.

Like in real life, how do you date? Call about friends, most of the reasons and content are entertainment: together to eat, sing, play, travel and so on. Only a very few people will call to see the diary and photo album together at home on weekends ...

Entertainment is an important social form in real life, and communication and sharing are often associated. The same is true on the Internet, and the game is the ultimate of entertainment.

Someone asked me: What kind of game is a qualified social game? How to give a common interactive game more social properties?

Before the second half of 2010, few people asked the question. After the second half of 2010, many of the questions asked were mobile game developers.
In fact, it is very simple, three requirements: the use of friend relationships, to lock the real user, for easy interaction .
Note that it is not easy to think of "networking versus" ≠ social games. It's not necessarily.

To achieve these three requirements, you will need to take advantage of an open platform--and sometimes even more than one open platform.
For example, you can do a social game on the Facebook run, you can also put the same game on the network to operate.
For example, you can do a social game in the Apple Store, users download to the iphone or ipad, the Internet can use Facebook or net account to activate the phone game, so as to play with their friends.
The second line of thought, in the future of online convergence, may be more prevalent-this is OpenID: the only true identity, the output of a true social relationship.
In the future China, SNS provides the unique identity and the real relation, or will become the triple net fusion, the cloud computing and even the thing network dna! (Let's talk about this question again.)

Look back to what I said earlier: " users grow fast, short life cycle, operation and maintenance difficult "; in fact, there is a subtext is "user loyalty is poor." Game development is a double-edged sword, for a platform is also the case. Developers to make this "active" continuation of the platform to let this "active" transformation.

② Information Application. the stability of this part of the application is much better than the game. This is because: information applications, is to meet a platform "the rigid needs of the public." On many social open platforms, such applications mainly include the user's self media capabilities (status, diaries, records, albums, videos, etc.). Correspondingly, on the mobile open platform, this kind of application is mainly related to the enhancement of communication functions. So some people call this kind of application " platform base application ", also is not unreasonable.

For example, many people will play the "garden" in the "Buy a House" component when they just join happy net. But a year later may not play again, many people just join happy net when will start to write diary, see reprint, but a year later he still can write diary, see reprint.

The main features of this type of application are: multiple platform integration opportunities-not only between the platform of the integration of the opportunities, but also between the terminal platform.

The application of this aspect is relatively simple. Just as Kik is popular on mobile phones, it may be more popular if social networking sites do Kik apps: It's not as simple as tying a social relationship to an address book (like the Friendstream in the HTC Android customization system).

Based on this, we are not even hard to imagine the Internet TV platform after the appearance of the Open.

③ Tool Application. Many people are dismissive of this part of the application. It is actually "long Tail": Amazon's goods are "long tail", and Apple's App Store has a "long tail" of goods. "Long tail" can not be simply interpreted as a small amount, in a sense, this "long tail" represents a stable user growth, loyalty is not easy to lose .

In a sense: the application of tools, more in a platform to meet the "small number of rigid demand." in particular, LBS is not an application of this type of tool, but rather a second type of basic application --because LBS is building a new social atlas with geo-relationships, or helping to restore the reality map in its entirety. I did an imprecise diagram to illustrate this relationship:

This kind of tool application will meet the needs of people living, studying and working. such as travel booking, language translation, document processing and so on, even nursery, driving school, stock, car rental. As in the fourth quarter of the Big Bang, the needs of small audiences, even mathematical formulas, are actually very stable. For a website, this is one of the effective ways to improve the stickiness of users.

In fact, Cross-platform application is worth discussing: The original title of this article is not "three big business Circle" but "three ways of Living", and then gave up. It's relative, after all: "Business district" is not limited to a particular platform environment--we should also see the convergence of the various open platforms: A program that can take Facebook users to the Apple App Store and move from the phone screen to the TV screen--which may be our future.