Our post entitled Analyzing Facebook’s fbFund Winners: A Mostly Quantitative Look which discussed fbFund ‘08 winners and their relative performance resulted in some great conversation which is exactly what we were hoping to foster.  As an information services platform, the ChubbyBrain team is hoping to do more of what we call “putting the truth out on the table” and letting a host of smart people offer up their insights and ideas.  This time, the community really delivered so thank you.

Our analysis was picked up by several other folks with some offering their value-added suggestions/insights and others offering up the analysis as food for thought for others.  Many of you were also nice enough to comment directly on our blog and offer your suggestions and ideas.  Whether you commented, blogged or Tweeted about it, thank you for sharing your ideas and the analysis with others and keeping the conversation going.

And with the great conversation this engendered, we’re already thinking about refreshing this in several months.  But we’re asking for your input here. Dave McClure of the Founder’s Fund commented on our initial post and highlighted something that is very important especially as we think about refreshing this analysis to evaluate fbFund ‘08 and ‘09 winners in the future.  The Monthly Activer Users (MAUs) statistic we used to gauge the relative performance/success of each app works quite well for apps that are customer-facing where users is a decent (but still imperfect) proxy for success.  As Dave pointed out in his comment, however, MAU is not the right statistic for platform apps which may be enabling other types of activity on Facebook.  For example, Kontagent which offers viral analytics for Facebook, is not best measured by the MAU metric.  There are other apps in this camp and the announcement today of fbFund ‘09 winners shows many more of these platform apps.

So the million dollar question is what is the best metric, measure, key performance indicator for enabling platform apps since MAU is not the right one?  The big caveat here is that the metric must be something publicly available or possible to triangulate to using public data sources.  This is required to enable comparisons across these apps.

If you’re an app developer, an enthusiast or a random brilliant person, we want to hear your ideas.  You can comment on this post or if you’d prefer, you can email us at team(at)chubbybrain(dot)com.

In the interim, below are some links to others who talked about our initial analysis as a source of information and/or who offered their own insights about the fbFund statistics we offered up.  If we’ve missed any other analyses including yours, please leave them in the comments or drop us a line at team(at)chubbybrain(dot)com.

• Wall Street Journal Venture Capital Dispatch - Facebook Fund Finalists: From Dating Tools to Rap Generators
• VentureBeat - This year’s fbFund finalists span Facebook’s platform, the web and the iPhone
• AllFacebook - How have fbFund Winners Performed Over the Past Year?
• Alex Onsager - Insights to Success on Facebook from fbFund Statistics