The issues that ail Facebook Platform
We’ve all heard of all the great news about Facebook Platform, but are there any major issues that come along with it? Well, indeed there are.
When you’ve got the audience that Facebook has (20 million unique users each and every month, and counting) and you give them all access to your application, which is hosted on your own servers, then something has got to give if your application becomes even mildly popular.
An excellent case of this is the Facebook Application, “Where I’ve Been“, which allows you to create a map of the world and highlight what countries you’ve visited. The creator, Craig Ulliott, says that his application has been installed by nearly half a million users, and the bandwidth costs are nearing $500 a month. That’s a lot of money, considering that he doesn’t make a cent from the application (besides the fact that he solicits PayPal donations in the application).
One blogger believes that Facebook should start a revenue sharing program to help cover costs incurred by the application developer, to make it more fair. This sounds like an acceptable solution; I’d like to see independent developers be able to develop Facebook applications, let them become successful, and not run into issues paying for hosting when the application actually becomes popular.
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Revenue sharing would be one idea to help keep developers on board. When developers start hearing stories like that of Craig Ulliott and the developers of iLike (who had their resources constantly eaten up by Facbook after the launch of their app), they might shy away from developing their applications – after all, what can be the benefit?
Either a) their application does well and they incur huge bandwidth charges with no viable method of income, or b) their app. remains obscure and they still don’t gain any income. (Although, those looking to gain experience will benefit)
I’m not saying that every developer wants money from Facebook, but in this case, the developers of the most popular apps should gain some compensation just because Facebook apps requires the developer to host their own application. (Providing back-end support)
I agree with the revenue sharing model. All he would need is a tenth of one cent per user to cover the hosting costs.
Personally, I am more excited by the fact that he is able to create a web application with 500,000 users, and host it for only $500 per month. This probably has a lot to do with Facebook’s server-side caching, but it is still cool that hosting has gotten so cheap.
if you don’t already, you should read Marc Andresseen’s blog (blog.pmarca.com). Of the blogs I’ve come across, that one is definitely the best when it comes to in depth analysis on technology & entrepreneurial related topics. He made a post a couple weeks back called: “Analysing the Facebook Platform, three weeks in” which talks about some of the issues Craig is facing but many more as well. Ning (to which he’s co-founder of) launched their app days later so you know hes definitely put some thought into it. Theres the link, enjoy: http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/06/analyzing_the_f.html.