DISQUS

Ryan · 1 year ago

I agree with your bullishness on Facebook as a whole but the apps things is significantly diluted at this point. Quite frankly when the apps first came out it was HUGE. Everyone was spending hours a day on Facebook and every newspaper, podcast, and blog was praising Facebook. Even Microsoft bought in at a rate of 15 bil. But, now many of my friends have returned back to their original uses of Facebook, messaging, picture sharing and well, stocking.

Personally I think the apps aspect of Facebook is on its way down. It is to diluted and this maybe one situation where Facebook made the wrong decision to open up their platform completely. Keeping some control may have been the better move here. Only time will tell.

Eric Dewhirst · 1 year ago

Nick you are right!

Ohh I don't want you to be right - but you are right. Beside the fact that even if you have a ton of users - what are you going to do to monetize them? No seriously what are you going to do? You sell them down the river with ads or spam them you are done for - you will have backlash 2.0 that will make FB Beacon look like an email outage.

Facebook is growing up and your take that big players with some serious back ends to back into FB will be the next wave is right on the money. Tricky tricks are done - now the next step is to leverage the social graph with apps that matter.

Cheers - Eric
www.pickuppal.com

Chad Boyda · 1 year ago

Absolutely. Still plenty of opportunity, but you will have to create a very good application, or have a large marketing budget.

This has obvious downsides, but there are some upsides too. For example, these changes will be an economic stimulant for the Facebook economy. Expect prices of ads to go up as inventory decreases and demand increases. This is good news to those developers who can capture and retain an audience.

Steve Poland · 1 year ago

Nick -- I agree with you in regards to Facebook. But there's still a playing field that's about to emerge on MySpace, bebo, Friendster, etc ... and despite apps being easily transported to those platforms, I think single person app developers could emerge to do well on those platforms.

Kyle davis · 1 year ago

Owning a Facebook app is useless, its like building a business in someone elses backyard. If they decide to have a BBQ and kick you out, they will. They are slowly taking back all the realestate they promised developers for building all the great apps. Well, thats what the developers get...Barnum said it best, there's one born every minute. The only winners are those ad networks like adblade and social media. They are the only ones making money. They produce nothing and generate big money.

zuckerborg · 1 year ago

making apps is easy, so what is your competitive advantage? business 101.