Verified Extortion
mattmaroon.com
mattmaroon.com
When thousands of people got daily invites to stupid apps, something had to be done. Regardless of whether facebook had ever announced the verified apps program, the new restrictions would make sense.
When you develop for a young platform (particularly a proprietary one) you should realize it may be a moving target. It's far from extortion!
If it were more money he might have a better case. But given other platforms cost thousands of dollars (Sony's Playstation program for example) I don't see $375 as that much of a hardship.
If they just said "everyone has to pay us $375/yr once they get over 10k installs" or something, I'd be way happier about making that payment.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigovian_tax
It may not be "fair" but it results in widespread modification of behavior in a socially beneficial way.
Taxes on carbon fuels are not fair -- lots of firms built up huge infrastructure on narrow profit margins before such taxes were imposed -- but if you advocate a different policy what would it be? Every policy entails some "transfer" from one group to another. At least with a tax the incentive is clear and obvious moving forward, and precisely targets the specific negative externality it's intended to address.
The new restrictions certainly made sense when they took average apps from infinite invites per day down to 20. But dropping that 20 back to 12, then charging you to get back to 20 doesn't help users in any way.
Try Googling for Zynga Revenues. The Facebook platform is orders of magnitude more profitable than iPhone.
Don't mistake buzz for profitability.
I can't up vote you enough. Almost tempted to create new HN accounts just to up vote you.
Of course now I re-read all my comments right after I post them, so I tend to delete quite a few before voting happens either way.
Don't get me started on my Mafia Wars addiction.
That adds up fast, since the platform makes it not too hard to get to hundreds of thousands (or even millions) of pageviews a day. 1m page views per day at 50 cents eCPM is still $182k per year. Not a bad second income stream.
Which ad network do you use?
1. How are Facebook apps monetized? Advertising?
2. What do applications use the collected user data for? I once saw a description of the kind of access an application gets to the user's data, and it seemed a bit daunting.
2. You can't really "collect" the data. Facebook's Terms state that you can't keep user data for longer than 24 hours. The original idea was that you could use their data to display demographically-relevant ads.
Ouch. And that can't be something Apple is looking for either.