Using AppData, which measures the usership of Facebook apps through the Facebook API, we determined “stickiness” for a handful of popular apps. Stickiness is the ratio of daily active users to monthly active users—or, the percentage of monthly users that use the app every day. It’s an excellent way to gauge an app’s popularity. We compared some competing apps that users mainly access through Facebook — Viddy and Socialcam, for example, and Draw Something vs. Words with Friends — to see which have higher user engagement. Here are the results.

Viddy vs. Socialcam

Facebook’s recent purchase of photo titan Instagram raises the stakes for the obvious next technology in line: social video. Viddy and Socialcam, both launched over two years ago, are battling for usership, brands and celebrities. With 6,600,000 daily active users and 54,100,000 monthly active users and a stickiness of 12 percent (compared to Viddy’s 1,500,000 DAU, 35,000,000 MAU and 4 percent stickiness) Socialcam is clearly in the lead.

Draw Something vs. Words With Friends

Zynga bought OMGPOP, the maker of Draw Something, in March. Since then, Zynga has started selling prime ad space on the app, and Draw Something’s user engagement has dropped to a still very respectable 25 percent. But not nearly as respectable as Words With Friends, which is at 40 percent — so that means, almost half of its monthly active Facebook users are spreading their words daily.

CityVille vs. FarmVille vs. CastleVille

Zynga has been making some big moves lately. This month, it joined with American Express for a Zynga Serve Rewards card, which offers users Zynga Farm Cash as opposed to more traditional rewards like actual cash or air travel.  Zynga also hired a Washington lobbyist firm to effect change in the real world as well. In its popular “ville” series of games,  CastleVille leads the pack when it comes to user engagement.

Readers: What other app pairs should we compare?

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Well, it seems the party has come to an end. The reality check is eerily reminiscent of the decline in attention for social news-reader applications. AppData.com statistics show a sharp decline in the number of daily active users of these services.

In my post yesterday, Facebook giveth & Facebook taketh: A curious case of video apps, I had pointed out that this was going to be a short-lived bump and the focus for apps cannot be on raw numbers but on retention and usage. That is, and will remain, the hard part of these apps. Finding sustainable growth is not an easy challenge.

As we have pointed out in the past, it is much easier to take and share photos (hence the popularity of Instagram) but capturing, editing and sharing videos is not as easy. Viddy, one of the social video creation and sharing apps, is betting that its roster of celebrity investors and friends would give the company a much needed jump start. Today, Justin Beiber signed up for Viddy and has been sharing his videos.

Socialcam, which had been injecting YouTube videos and sharing them through its player, is now going to have to find new and novel ways to share. The company made some changes today that are less spammy and address many of the issues I had brought up in my post yesterday.

Michael Seibel, CEO of Socialcam, in an email wrote:

1. When you auth the FB app instead of saying Ok, Watch Video it says allow or Go to App (Facebook default language.)
2. When you go to the Socialcam website there is a clear pop up explaining Social Mode.
3. There is an uninstall Socialcam link in the blue Facebook box below the video.
4. On Youtube videos Youtube branding is made extremely clear with Youtube approved logos.
5. Any Youtube video in related is also clearly branded.
6. Social Mode stay off when you switch browsers and/or log out.
7. If you turn Social Mode off on the app or the website it will reflect on the other (it doesn’t display correctly on the app – we are pushing a new version to address this – but it won’t push any Facebook actions.)

Now the hard part begins.

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In reality, what is more likely is that Facebook can turn on or turn off the traffic spigot and hence play the king maker. Bilton quotes an anonymous source as saying, “Facebook is now understanding the type of information it has about what is successful online, or what is a potential threat to Facebook.”

I would take that comment with a pound of salt. Why? Because Facebook is good at hoarding data, but is terrible at interpreting the data: putting a proper context around it and then putting it to use. If you want to know the reason for my skepticism, just look at the lameness/pointlessness of the advertisements that show up next to your stream. For a more clear example of Facebook’s lack of context, just look at the red-hot video apps such as Viddy and Socialcam. On paper they may look the same, but in reality they are as different as chalk and cheddar.

Not all videos are equal

A few months ago, Viddy, a mobile video creation and sharing app, started to use Facebook’s Open Graph to post videos to people’s timelines. For instance, if I took a video clip, edited and shared it, it would show up on Facebook timeline if you viewed the video. If you liked someone’s Viddy video, the action would show up in your news feed (depending on Facebook’s algorithm). If your friend happens to see that item on their news feed on their smartphone, they would in turn get a prompt that gives them the “option” to download the Viddy app.

To be fair, this behavior is no different from how Facebook’s  open graph works for other mobile video apps, social news readers and even music-listening apps such as Spotify. The automatic sharing is what made social news readers targets of criticism, and Viddy too has received  similar criticism. Nevertheless, it wasn’t long before Viddy started to show up in everyone’s Facebook feeds and in the process IT became one of the hottest apps on Facebook and on the iTunes Store.

The timing for the app couldn’t be more fortuitous. Viddy exploded within days of Facebook announcing its intentions to acquire photo-sharing service Instagram for about a billion dollars in stock and cash. Viddy benefitted from the “Instagram for video meme.”

The hype around the app increased even more when celebrity investors such as Jay-Z, Biz Stone, Shoedazzle founder Brian Lee and Shakira put money in the company. Rumors began  circulating that the company was going to get $30 million in funding at a valuation of around $300 million. Sure enough, Khosla Ventures, Battery Ventures and NEA pumped in major dollars into the company.

Viddy wasn’t the only social-mobile video app benefiting from Facebook’s Open Graph largesse. Another “Instagram of video” wannabe, Socialcam, started to zoom up the charts too and in the process was able to raise a ton of money from angel investors that include Yuri Milner, Ashton Kutcher, Brian Chesky of AirBnB and Ari Emmanuel.

I have been suspicious of the sudden growth spurt in video apps. When I saw long-forgotten video platforms such as Dailymotion and Metacafe starting to show up in my news feed and soon after near the top of the Facebook app charts, I knew something was amiss. Was this a repeat of the social news reader phenomenon? When I posted messages on Facebook bemoaning the spammy-behavior of  many of video apps, the comments on my feed lit up and many cursed out these apps.

I went back to the video apps and saw that Viddy has fallen of the top of the iOS charts and is now down to #48 on the iTunes store. In comparison, Socialcam is still flying high at relatively #2 spot. Viddy in fact has trended down on Appsdata’s daily active app user base as well, while Socialcam is still at top with about 41.4 million monthly active users. Socialcam’s crazy growth started on April 24th. That made me even more curious. What is Socialcam doing that is keeping its flag flying high versus Viddy, which seems to have returned to a more predictable and normal growth curve?

Michael Seibel, chief executive of Socialcam, said the Facebook changes had catapulted his company to one of the top 100 sites on the Internet. “Since then we’ve seen 10 times growth.” [The New York Times]

Something didn’t add up and it wasn’t till you see Socialcam’s popular and trending videos pages that you understand the full picture. These pages are full of videos of crazy Fox newscasters and other stuff, normally the preserve of YouTube. Many of these videos are actually from YouTube, though I am not certain how Socialcam is putting all those videos on their service. The Next Web’s Drew Olanoff went ahead and did a breakdown of how Socialcam is making it all work.

Once you have a lot of users inside of your app, it’s hard to keep them. One of the ways to do that is to make sure that there’s great content for them to find. For a user generated content app like Socialcam, you’d think that the content would come from its users. Unfortunately, that might not be the case here. It appears that Socialcam is pulling in YouTube videos to its service and passing them off as content uploaded by its users.

The way I stumbled onto this is that to view a Socialcam video in your Facebook Newsfeed, you have to sign up for the app, and it’s safe to say that these non-app users account for some of those 36M. It’s a practice similar to that of social readers used by Washington Post and it’s pretty annoying. I’m also an app user and have social sharing off, so none of my video views or comments end up my timeline. However, when I accessed a video through Socialcam’s site via Facebook, social sharing magically turned back on, thus sharing this in the Newsfeed of my friends.

Blurry Picture

Olanoff’s assessment is spot on. In addition, Socialcam is buying traffic (and downloads) from the likes of Tapjoy and FreeAppaDay, thus boosting its total app numbers.

Download the @FreeAppADay.com Store App and wish for top rated paid apps to become FREE for a day [Socialcam iTunes page description]

Socialcam isn’t alone. If you look at the top ten video apps on Facebook, they are essentially repackaging videos from somewhere else.  What I am amazed with is that YouTube and Facebook would allow such behavior. No word from Facebook just yet, but when I asked YouTube, a spokesperson replied:

While we don’t comment on individual cases, we take any violation of our open API’s Terms of Service seriously and take action against known abusers.

When I asked Michael Seibel, CEO of Socialcam, how can they be showing YouTube videos when they are an app for creating videos, he said that more people watch videos than they create videos. And what they are doing is offering people a chance to see videos even when they don’t have friends on Socialcam or videos from friends. He did say that Socialcam has seen about 3 million videos uploaded to the service and are currently seeing between 1,500 to 2,500 videos being uploaded to the service every hour.

When I argued that their approach doesn’t really add up to be “Instagram of video,” Seibel said that it was a label chosen by the media and not by the company. “We have two clear purposes: help you watch videos created and watch by your friends and also create amazing videos.”

A chink in Facebook’s armor?

This is a nice arbitrage scheme that exposes Facebook’s shortcomings. And it has to do with how Facebook’s Open Graph works.

My understanding is that there is a certain amount of inventory in Facebook’s news feed that is devoted to different categories such as news articles, photos, videos, games and music. They try and create a balance within those categories and depending on the click-throughs, comments, likes and shares a certain item gets, that is surfaced in a person’s feed. Now if there is a video with a header – two hot girls kissing or Lil Wayne is gay — how do you think it will do versus your dog running around on a beach? That magic formula has worked for the likes of Socialcam, but to call it Instagram of video is just wrong. Like I said earlier, Viddy is from Venus and Socialcam is from Mars.

The King Maker

The saga of these very different video apps is being played on a much bigger stage. I bet you I am not the only one who has noticed the “Facebook-the-king-maker theme.” I wondered: had Facebook given a deliberate boost to all video apps just to reinforce its value of its platform in the mind of skittish investors? The idea that they could drive app-downloads across platforms – Facebook, Android, iOS and HTML5 – was definitely a way to blunt any questions around company’s questionable (and lagging) mobile strategy. The launch of Facebook Appstore was yet another brilliant PR move to divert attention away from Facebook’s shortcomings.

The last word on this saga comes from Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures who writes on his blog:

SEO and Facebook timeline integration is “best practice” on the Internet. You should do both. They can be great free acquisition channels. But they are not great retention channels. Because easy come easy go.

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Viddy is one of a large number of mobile video-sharing apps that have popped up over the last year or so. The goal is to enable users to take advantage of the high-quality video cameras in their pockets and to share moments with friends, hopefully to become a type of “Instagram for video.” Viddy is one of the most well-funded in the category, with a $6 million Series A round from Battery Ventures, Greycroft Ventures and Qualcomm that closed a few weeks ago. It’s also gotten some buy-in from major content providers like Disney, which it partnered with for the release of the new Muppets movie.

The Viddy app has recently seen its usage climb over the last few days and weeks — yesterday it was one of the top five apps in the App Store’s photo and video category. And while the startup has touted celebrity users like Snoop Dogg, Linkin Park and Bill Cosby as key to its early success, I recently received a tip that Viddy users might actually be looking for some less savory material being posted by users. (For what it’s worth, I wasn’t the only one tipped off — it looks like Business Insider’s Steve Kovach was also notified of some of the same activity.)

I took a look at the app and some of its top users. And while I failed to see anything that I would call full-on porn, there’s certainly a lot of suggestive material floating around. Take a look at the most-popular users, and they’re all female, all attractive. A lot of what I saw was just eye candy; you know, a hot girl talking to the camera, etc. But then there’s also a ton of booty shaking. Viddy basically taught me what “twerking” is.

The Viddy spokesperson tells me that the app has some tools in place to filter adult material, and users have the ability to flag videos that might be questionable. However, those filters don’t appear to have been enough to please Apple, with whom Viddy is “working diligently” to resolve the issue.

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The latest financing is being led by Benchmark Capital, with existing investors Matrix and Rossman also participating. With the round, Klip will add Benchmark general partner Bruce Dunlevie to its board of directors, which also includes Rossman and Josh Hannah of Matrix Partners.

Rossman told is in a phone interview that the company raised more funding mostly due to the huge opportunity that is in front of it. The social, mobile video sharing segment is growing fast, he said, and Klip wants to capture as much share as it can, as quickly as possible. The Klip app has been doing pretty well in the two months it’s been available: Rossman noted that it’s been one of the top-ranked apps for sharing videos via mobile devices. It’s also been in the top 25 for photo and video apps since launch.

That said, it’s still early in the video-sharing segment and there are at least half a dozen similar apps, including Socialcam, Vlix, Viddy and Vibop.

With a long road ahead and plenty of competition, Klip is hoping this latest round of funding will give it some runway and help see it through the next few years.

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Before today, San Francisco-based Socialcam was already the leading video sharing application available for the iPhone. The 2 million download milestone occurred just six months after launch — but more importantly, it comes just two months after Socialcam announced it had hit a million downloads. That shows that the service is catching on and customer acquisition is actually improving with time.

But Socialcam has made a pretty fantastic update to its app by incorporating filters that will let users add a little color to their videos. The app is launching with five “vintage” filters, including 1970s, Bohemian, Noir, Sepia and Rouge; and three “experimental” filters, labeled Acid, Foil and Electronica.

While there are other video sharing apps that allow users to add filters to the things that they shoot — Vlix, Viddy and Vibop come to mind — Socialcam’s implementation adds the filter at the time that the video is shot. And it’s easier than ever to get to those filters — all a user has to do to select one is flick across the screen and a new filter will appear.

The good news in the way Socialcam has implemented filters is that you see what the video looks like before it’s finished, and there’s no timely processing that happens at the end. The bad news is that users don’t have access to any sort of unfiltered raw video file when they’re done shooting.

According to CEO Michael Seibel, Socialcam can build new effect by automatically converting photo filters or graphics into video filters. It’s also separated the filters out from the rest of the app code, giving it the flexibility to quickly add new filters without issuing an actual update to the app.

Socialcam was recently spun out of Justin.tv as a standalone company. The startup, which is based in San Francisco, now has four employees working on the app.

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With an ever-growing number of consumers walking around with video cameras on their mobile phones, Klip hopes to become the go-to app for shooting, uploading and sharing videos with friends. With a simple interface for connecting to networks like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, Klip makes it easy to reach friends and family where they already are.

Of course, Klip is far from alone in the social/mobile video sharing game. There are any number of startups seeking to own the nascent market and become the Instagram of video. Among others, there’s Socialcam (recently spun out from Justin.tv), BlipSnips, Tout, Vibop, Viddy, Vlix and Vloggo.

Klip’s big differentiator is an ultrafast adaptive-streaming technology that enables users to quickly scroll through elements of a video without having to play the whole thing. It also has a dynamic hashtag system, which lets users create and track different categories attached to videos that are uploaded. And, like most competitors, it also lets users tag their friends in videos, make comments and favorite videos that were uploaded by friends and contacts.

For an idea of how it works, check out this promotional video from Klip:

One other advantage Klip has is its founder: The company was created in April 2011 by serial entrepreneur Alain Rossman, the former chairman of Vudu (before the company was sold to Wal-Mart) and OpenWave, among others. Altogether, Rossman has founded five startups, three of which went public and two of which were acquired. This latest venture has raised $2 million in funding from Rossman and Matrix Partners.

That said, it’s a very crowded market. Klip has very cool technology, but it will also need consumer adoption to make it worthwhile for most users. With a number of competitors already vying for consumers’ attention when it comes to sharing their videos on social networks, Klip has a tough road ahead.

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Take Instagram, the photo app/social network as an example. They got a few things right and over 10 million people turned them into the leader in a market where there were others apps and services with a “social network” and “filters.” It just caught onto something that is ephemeral and not listed on any slide deck — happiness & emotions. When I see Instagram today, I don’t see a social network — I see a hub of attention where we share and get lost in carefully edited, curated and somewhat beautified lives with others. Just like television or music videos — it is where we choose to spend our attention.

And one of the reasons why many of these services such as Vlix will fail to succeed is that they don’t quite know what is that they are trying to offer. Oh that, and a growing list of competitors. Vlix’s competitors include Vibop, BlipSnips, Socialcam, Tout, Viddy, Vlixand Vloggo. Socialcam seems to be a leader in this market, but just.

PS: I will be chatting with Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom at our upcoming Mobilize 2011 conference on Sept 26 and 27th in San Francisco’s Mission Bay Center. Join us.

But to hear former Justin.tv and new Socialcam CEO Michael Seibel tell it, breaking the social video sharing app out of the live streaming business was always part of the plan. The startup started work on the app about a year ago, after noticing that most of the viewers for videos from the Justin.tv mobile broadcasting app were watching videos on demand. Launched this spring, Socialcam surpassed expectations, hitting a million downloads in just four months and showing much greater engagement by users than was expected.

The decision to go it alone comes as Socialcam is trying to win its place as the top mobile video sharing app. In a phone interview, Seibel said he believes the mobile app space has become one in which there’s a single leader for each vertical application. So for instance, Foursquare is the place to go for location sharing; Instagram has become the go-to app for posting photos. And Socialcam wants to be the app for sharing videos online.

Of course, Socialcam isn’t alone. There’s a whole cottage industry emerging under the “Instagram for videos” umbrella; There’s BlipSnips, Tout, Vibop, Viddy, Vlix and Vloggo. Each has its own particular strengths — Vlix and Vibop, for instance, add easy editing tools, while BlipSnips enables users to tag their friends at specific moments in their videos — but all seek to be the go-to app for sharing short videos with friends from their mobile devices.

To better compete in an increasingly crowded market, Seibel said Socialcam needed to switch from being a “startup within a startup” to actually controlling its own destiny. And so, while the Justin.tv team moves into new digs at the end of the month, the new Socialcam team will be joining video startups like Cull.tv and Squrl in the Founders Den in San Francisco.

Seibel is taking over as CEO of Socialcam, with founder and CTO of Justin.tv Emmett Shear taking the chief executive role at the live streaming business. The focus on the live streaming side will be on TwitchTV — a live streaming site for the gamer community that Justin.tv launched in June.

Seibel wouldn’t comment on Socialcam’s financing, except to say that Justin.tv owned a stake in the independent entity and that it was looking to raise some more financing independently. Socialcam has four team members now; in addition to Seibel, Guillaume Luccisano and Ammon Bartram, who previously worked for Justin.tv, are also founders.

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Tout is a service that lets users record short 15-second moments and share them with friends. Originally, the service launched with an iPhone app, as well as the ability to share short video clips from YouTube. The latest update, which just launched in the last few days, enables Tout users to record or upload videos straight from the web browser.

That will broaden potential usage of Tout, which so far has been tied to its iOS app. While an Android app is in the works, it will be a few more weeks before it becomes available to users. And, of course, offering a webcam or video upload capability also taps into the vast population of users who *gasp* don’t have a smartphone with a camera at all. It will also potentially put Tout up against browser-based sharing services like Vyou.

In addition to new ways to share moments with followers on the service, it also now allows users to “re-tout” and reply to one another’s videos. Users whose videos are replied to will then get mobile and email notifications telling them someone has posted a response.

According to CEO Michael Downing, the reply function came out of user behavior that was already happening on the service, as users attempted to engage with each other, even if the tools weren’t quite there yet to support it. Just as Twitter didn’t have retweet (RT) or @ replies built into its original code base, but added them to its products later, Tout is drawing on suggestions from the community to help drive its product road map.

Continuously adding features is one way that Tout hopes to compete in an increasingly crowded market for sharing short video messages with friends. In the past year, we’ve seen new entrants like Justin.tv’s Socialcam, Spotmixer’s Vlix, Vloggo and Viddy all launch, each seeking to become the “Instagram of video.”

Tout is also trying to drive interest by signing up celebrities to the service. The biggest celeb to sign up so far is probably Shaquille O’Neal (no pun intended), who not only announced his retirement from basketball using Tout, but also joined the startup’s board. Shaq’s presence has been huge, as the former NBA star drove more than a million views in just 24 hours after his retirement announcement.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user David Burillo.

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