MyCalendar Now Reaching a Whopping 28 Million Monthly Users on Facebook

As LivingSocial continues its ascent past 31 million monthly active users and beyond, the MyCalendar application has jumped into the top 5 on the Facebook application leaderboard, joining popular apps Super Wall, Movies, and Causes. MyCalendar has quietly gained momentum in recent weeks, now reaching a total of over 28 million monthly active users (MAU) between two different copies of the app, according to AppData. MyCalendar allows users to populate calendars with birthdays, holidays, and other customizable occasions, and invite friends to join these events. Reminders are then sent to users via email or Facebook Notifications anywhere between one day and three weeks before the event (or no reminders at all), based on user settings. In addition to the main calendaring feature, the application provides other birthday-related features, including sending virtual gifts to friends, weekly horoscope reads, and personality assessments based on birth month. These stories are published to users' Walls and the News Feed with permission. The popularity of apps that enable users to track, organize, and share events with their friends on Facebook is natural: on Facebook, an event organizer can not only expect to find most invitees, but can also anticipate viral circulation if that’s the intention. Yet, despite the healthy demand to make calendars more social, it’s surprising that MyCalendar has earned a spot next to the consistently high-performing applications LivingSocial and Super Wall. A possible reason for this unexpected high growth is that since Facebook’s homepage redesign, birthday reminders have become less visible, making it easier to unintentionally miss a friend’s birthday. While MyCalendar solves this problem by giving you the option of adding your friends’ birthdays to your calendar, even suggesting upcoming birthdays to you, doing so essentially sends requests to your friends to install the app. This is also the case when you invite friends to attend your events. In other words, the app isn't shy about using viral tactics to boost installs. Overall, the user experience can be improved, as you’re constantly worried whether the next click will spam your friends. Navigating around the application can also be distracting. You’re frequently being asked to take IQ quizzes and install the Pass a Drink app, both of which are irrelevant and navigate you away from the app itself. Another improvement could be made on the editing process: currently, editing events that you’ve already created involves deleting and recreating them with your new edits. A question to think about is how users and Facebook will react to leading applications that aren’t necessarily transparent or well-designed, two overarching principles that guide Facebook’s delayed Application Verification Program. However, as shown by MyCalendar’s daily declines in MAU, there’s some indication that MyCalendar's envied growth may not be sustainable in the long-term. The application leaderboard should be viewed in its entirety. To be fair, retaining users is challenging for any social calendar application. With so many competing choices to manage and share events, Facebook’s own Events application being one of them, not to mention Google and Outlook calendars, owning more than one calendar gets tiring, and few would choose to access their calendars through Facebook when forced to simplify. While MyCalendar may be winning for now, its long-term success will depend on whether or not it can prove itself to be a truly social application, being meaningful, trustworthy, and well-designed.

Social Pro Daily

MyCalendar Now Reaching a Whopping 28 Million Monthly Users on Facebook

Jessica Lee

About

Subscriptions

Events

Publications

WORK SMARTER - LEARN, GROW AND BE INSPIRED.

Subscribe today!

Jessica Lee