Netphase

On Tuesday, Forbes posted a bizarre article, Fear Among Facebook Developers, that seems to suggest if you’re not a big brand on the Internet then you should just pack your bags and go home.

The issue is that Facebook is going to start putting more of its own ads throughout the site. Big surprise. However, Facebook also allows apps to generally put whatever they want in the application canvas, including ads. If Facebook advertises something else outside the canvas then it’s not that big a deal to me. As a developer, I don’t really need them to provide me an “ad widget” as the author suggests; I can use Google Ads, The Deck or whatever.

If a small application developer is under the illusion that he can win a fight with a big-brand widget, that’s a bad plan, says Gerd Leonhard, chief executive of Sonific, which recently launched a music widget on Facebook.

Strange comment. “Sonific” doesn’t sound like a big brand to me, and yet they just launched a music widget? Good for them. However, it seems to me like they’re trying to scare off competition. Also, the net is the quintessential mechanism for some little guy knocking over “big brands”. In fact, that’s what Facebook is!

A couple months ago, we launched our first Facebook app for I’m In. Within a week about 1000 people had installed it to check it out. That’s pretty cool, considering all we had to do was get it added to the Facebook directory. So, over the long run will it generate more transactions for I’m In? I think so, but time will tell. For a site like that, it wouldn’t take too many added sales to cover the cost of building an app like Mad Libs™.