Oct 08 2007
Facebook Apps: TNBT* or Fool’s Gold?
Joe Davison over at Name Strategy has put together a very interesting post that dismantles any idea that writing apps for FaceBook might be a good thing under their current platform development license…
As more and more people open up their platforms, this is going to become a recurring theme: the idea that even beyond the fact that the provider (in the case, FaceBook) can arbitrarily cut you off, that many of these platforms can and do give themselves license to steal from the people who are generating traffic and content for their site is reprehensible.
Anyone (and I mean ANYONE) thinking about developing a commercial FaceBook app needs to read this post. Right now, any idea that anyone other than FaceBook is going to make money on that platform is just an illusion. Looking at these T&Cs, I’m willing to bet some beer that any commercial apps that are running on FaceBook right now are people who have special deals or are in-bed with FaceBook at some level with the founder or FaceBook’s VCs. This unctuous set of licensing terms also may account Tim O’Reilly’s “Long Tail” post last week regarding the viability of FaceBook Apps…
I’d say that have about 30 days to clean up this mess (read: fix their license and make it startup friendly) or FaceBook will be yet another dead social networking site.
Seriously.
No grown-up running a start-up will tolerate having their ideas stolen, having their users pulled arbitrarily out from under them, and especially not having “taxes” (in the FaceBook licensing parlance) arbitrarily levied on their profits. Any VC’s that would fund such an endeavor will have a lot of ’splaining to do to their LPs…
*TNBT == The Next Big Thing.
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