DISQUS

Prior to this, app stories appearing on the home page were non-exsistant.

Now apps can publish stories that appear soon thereafter on all the users' friends' home pages. However, they must be short stories which generally require a confirmation from the user before being published.

This new situation is better for apps that implement short stories as now they can appear on the home page whereas before most apps has no chance to appear on the home page.

That's the most deceptive thing I've ever seen. Basically they compare two $300K campaigns, one with 10k for banners and 290k for media buy, the other 50k for an app and 250k for a media buy. Then the flim-flam, the first has a $3 CPM and the the later magically gets a $0.40 CPM, and viola, the one with the way lower CPM turns out to be the better value. If I can get $0.40 CPM, why don't I just run my traditional banners there?

What would end up happening is that people would upload picures of Chinese sweatshops and tag them Nike or Wall Mart. Imagine what photos would show up on all the pages for politicians.

Their ads are in an iframe. Facebook passes your user id and all your friends ids to this iframe. They must be storing it and cookiing you with your id from their domain. That's what they do now, just randomly displaying pictures of people from the passed friend ids to make the ad look more interesting. What they seem to be planning is to use data from their apps to see which friends you actually interact with. Anyway, if you don't like it just change settings to block 3rd party cookies. 10 seconds, privacy issues solved.

What missing from this analysis is that Social Media ads are largely a closed system. That is apps advertising on other apps. Since Social Media takes a cut, for that $8 million paid out, $10 million was probably paid in by apps. Using your 1000 developers number, that averages out to negative $2,000 per developer. The average app is losing money on ads, not making money from them.

I think this is a mistake. Meeting new people is one of the best things about a social network. I already have multiple ways to keep in touch with people I already know.

This has always been a weak point with facebook, even with network pages. Look for more success from dating/meet people types of apps after this.

Facebook groups are a mess. It's impossible to browse and search groups. I don't see them as replacing network pages.

I would confirm that Hi5 is more viral than MySpace. The Hi5 direcotry is actually live and linked from your profile page.

Hi5 has OS messaging, while MySpace only launched proprietary messaging a few days ago. Hi5 has a lot less apps, and perhaps better quality.

The MySpace directory is being flooded with hundreads of crappy quiz apps and single app per show/team watercooler apps that almost ruined Facebook.

Basically another reaction to Slide's spammy tactics. Remember a couple of weeks ago they were caught reviewing their own apps under dozens of fake profiles.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/04/03/slide-caug...

All requests from fb pass a signature using a shared secret key. There is no way a hacker could generate this sig without knowing the secret key. The default libraries use this key to validate the user, so anyone simply following the example apps would have a pretty secure app.

Ironic considering that AOL was basically the most popular social network at one point.

Watercooler's entire business model is built upon stealing the IP of other companies. They're in no position to complain.

This does nothing to prevent requiring invites in order to use features of an app. All it requires is that the user go to another page when clicking "skip". That page may very well be a message about how friends must be invited.

Let's see. Identify someone famous. Build something successful entirely based on their fame. Then say "pay me off or lose your fans." This is called extortion. It doesn't matter how much work you put into it, it is illegal.

I feel your pain. I submitted apps starting 6 days after the fb launch. It took them 5 weeks to approve them. 5 weeks while watching all those that launched rocket up.

Why would starbucks pay for something they're already getting for free?

I'm still not clear on the policy. Let's say I create a page called Unofficial Radiohead Fan Club. I'm not misrepresenting it and the unofficial fan club is a real entity.

I think you are confusing daily active users with total active users in arriving at your $33 number. If there are 600 people a day using the app and each day it's a different 600, then there could be 18,000 active users a month. The real total will obviously be lower, but it's not unreasonable to assume around 10,000 people using the app at least once a month, so the valuation would be closer to $2/active user.

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tom_kincaid at hotmail.com