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Comment by lanej0 | Hacker News Reader

What's the revenue model on a Facebook app? You're getting a tiny piece of advertising pie? Sorry, but building a company based off of what amounts to a plugin for someone else's software just doesn't seem like a good idea to me...

... that said, I guess it was done with PhotoShop a bunch of times. But people had to pay up front for that software.

Or are we returning to the dot com days where revenue doesn't matter -- it's all about pageviews?

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That was the point I was trying to make. Perhaps you get easier access to liquidity and can gather users a tad faster but in the end you have very little control. You don't own the liquidity you are borrowing it, you don't even have a TOS contract (at least that one that I could find) with facebook, they can shut you down without any warning.

Even if you can make a very profitable app, imagine trying to IPO a facebook app... How do you think investors would evaluate the risk.

I can understand developing a facebook app as a part of a more comprehensive strategy as a complimentary tool to your website. That might be a very powerful tactic but as a standalone product, I just don't get it.

Again if anyone understands this differently I'd love to finally see what I am missing here...

Agreed. I was reading the latest Entrepreneur magazine where they had an interview with Guy Kawasaki about truemors.com. He mentioned something to the effect of the majority of their traffic came via. the facebook app -- but the traffic wouldn't matter if there's no way to convert that to dollars.

No doubt on the IPO/TOS front. Imagine if someone develops some facebook app that leads to massive litigation. I'm sure facebook would share in the liability as they are the delivery mechanism. All of a sudden, facebook decides to limit access to only a chosen few developers.

Or better yet, facebook has a soft quarter and decides that developers now need to license the platform for some exorbitant rate.

I don't live in a place where VC funding is likely and I don't have a partner. I'm also not good at web design nor do I have good contacts among top web 2.0 bloggers.

And from my startup prototypes so far, I have learned that most users have very little patience, understand little, and generally don't contribute much.

For these reasons, toy Facebook apps seem to be my best bet. I also like the idea of playing with people's minds, easily tweaking things here and there to see what sort of psychological/sociological impact they will have, etc.

1) If VC funding isn't likely how about angel funding, they are significantly less geographically centered and can be found almost everywhere.

2) Web design can be outsourced very easily and relatively cheaply offshore - ping me if you need some contacts or places to look.

3) Look for partners in your wider circle of friends you might be surprised by what you find. Failing that, go to your local college and try to recruit one.

4) Prototypes are actually great tools to test ideas and to improve your technical skills and biz intuition but in the end you need to promote something to a real product status and then facebook is less relevant as far as I can understand the platform.

Good luck

Okay, so you're talking about developing a hobby, not a business. Unless you've come up with a new way to convert "psychological/sociological impact" into dollars.

I think some Facebook apps make quite a lot of money in advertising -- at least enough income for the few developers involved.

I think that's the majority of the reason. If you're getting a couple million views a day on some silly facebook app, that can be a big deal for a smaller company.

I read iLike added 3 million users in two weeks with their Facebook app (http://mashable.com/2007/06/11/ilike-facebook-app-success/). That's pretty significant.

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