Value in Facebook Apps
If you have a web site or service that appeals to the younger web-savvy demographic, you are basically crazy if you do not build a Facebook application for it. We are building our first Facebook application at the moment and have been impressed with just how super easy it is. If you make the Facebook application super simple and virally attractive to Facebook users, its about the quickest way gain a massive amount of users out of anything that you can currently achieve with the internet.
The number of applications available is exponentially growing. The ones that bubble to the top are starting to be worth money, as just like traditional web applications, if they have a large number of users on board, that is worth money - regardless of whether it exists inside the bounds of Facebook or not. Because Facebook allow developers to include their own sponsored advertising listings in their applications, its completely up to the developer as to how they want to try to generate income from their apps.
This Christmas application showed up in the Facebook Developers Discussion board, listed on Ebay for US$6600, with members remarking “great another 10 day old app trying to get 6 figures”. The author responds with “Have another look - it’s 4 figures, then a decimal point, then another 2 figures. That’s a 4 figure sum. Hopefully it’ll go for more than that though? I reckon there’ll be over a million users by 1st Dec”. There is a lot of this caper going on at the moment.
Basically, once these developers understand the simplicity of building Facebook apps, they are quickly pushing out new ones and listing them on Ebay as little as just a week after launch. This is only made possible by Facebook being the perfect platform to virally spread applications, allowing them to attract large numbers of users super quickly, creating an immediate dollar value.
Tags: Web development