Facebook barely scratching the surface of the platform's potential?

by Ted Wallingford Oct 8th 2007

"Funwalls." Free Conference Calls. "Gifts" in the form of bitmaps of red roses. Today's Facebook applications are heavy on the social and light on the networking, and techy thought-pioneer Tim O'Reilly says in a new report that today's Facebook apps aren't exactly making their developers wealthy. So it makes us wonder, are more promising applications around the next turn, or is social networking really the gimmick its detractors claim? Is the Facebook "platform" just a mechanism to drive more traffic into the web site when better, more obvious, pre-existing solutions exist outside the Facebook ecosphere?

While we think certain applications offer a compelling case, like eBay's offering, we're constantly amazed at how folks will try to pass off something that wouldn't make the cut for the O'Reilly Hacks Series as a legitimate add-on, like this so-called Skype-Facebook Mashup. With so many Facebook add-ons rolling around the bottom of the bit-barrel and receiving little to no attention, it begs the question, will anybody glean as much Facebook mindshare as iLike, or is Ken Camp correct when he refers to most Facebook apps as not "genuinely useful"?

Tags: ebay, facebook, iotum, oreilly

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Michael Phipps said 6:44PM on 10-08-2007

I think that too many facebook apps are just gimmicky toys - which I find annoying. How many pirate v's ninja invitations have you knocked back?

I also think that the only form of income that facebook app developers (f.a.d.s!) think is possible is via ad revenue. I think once f.a.d.s start considering using micropayments to monetise transactions, that will change things, since developers will start thinking about the value of a transaction. Is the application worthwhile v's a boredom buster.

Of course the challenge will be making transactions valuable enough that your average college student will want to pay for it.

Julian Bond said 5:21AM on 10-09-2007

Seeing as how Facebook already has fields in the profile for IM packages including Skype. And all the IM packages have a mechanism for showing presence on a web page with a clickable button that launches a chat. Why doesn't Facebook just implement this anyway. Then the Skype app wouldn't be needed.

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