The Facebook Nation Economy Index

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The Republic of Facebook : The Stats and Numbers

Facebook Platform Statistics as of May 2010:

• More than one million developers and entrepreneurs from more than 180 countries
  
• More than 550,000 active applications currently on Facebook Platform
  
•  Every month, more than 70% of Facebook users engage with Platform applications
  
• More than 250,000 websites have integrated with Facebook Platform
  
• More than 100 million Facebook users engage with Facebook on external websites every month

Third party companies such as Adonomics, Kontagent and Mixpanel provide application metrics, and blogs such as AppRate, Inside Facebook, and Face Reviews have sprung up in response to the clamor for Facebook applications. On July 4, 2007, Altura Ventures announced the "Altura 1 Facebook Investment Fund," becoming the world's first Facebook-only venture capital firm.

On August 29, 2007, Facebook changed the way in which the popularity of applications is measured, to give attention to the more engaging applications, following criticism that ranking applications only by the number of people who had installed the application was giving an advantage to the highly viral, yet useless applications.Tech blog Valleywag has criticized Facebook Applications, labeling them a "cornucopia of uselessness.Others have called for limiting third-party applications so the Facebook "user experience" is not degraded.