Feld Thoughts - The Facebook Problem
I completely agree with Brad’s assessment of the Facebook problem.
The Problem: As of today, Facebook is deriving massive benefit in all the application development that they?ve enabled. They?ve brilliantly created an open community that allows developers to quickly create applications that can rapidly acquire hundreds of thousands of users. This dramatically extends the functionality of Facebook by offloading the R&D and feature development to the apps developers. (How about all of them there adverbs ? I sound like a press release.) However, as far as I can tell, none of these Facebook apps developers are deriving any real benefits (if you are a Facebook apps developer and ARE deriving a tangible benefit, other than customer acquisition within the Facebook infrastructure, please weigh in.) In addition, Facebook has shifted all of the infrastructure costs to these apps developers, creating the “I have 250,000 users, now what?? problem.
I think it’s great that developers of these apps will create them for the good of the community. This happens often, but I think the quality of apps created for use within the Facebook platform will be that much better if developers of these apps were compensated economically, especially within the current Facebook environment that requires developers of these apps to host them on their own.
