King  Gary 

When you look at Facebook‘s Application Directory, you see that next to “All”, it notes “307″, suggesting that there are a total of 307 Facebook Applications in all.

This is not true. 307 simply states the number of Applications that Facebook deems is allowed to be in the Directory, meaning that these are high-quality applications that they believe gives value to most Facebook users. Facebook Application developers can still create Applications, but they are not listed in the Directory unless approved by Facebook.

When people look at the number “307″, they believe that there is a small number of Applications available and that there’s still the chance to create new Applications without competing with others.

This is also not true, since, as I mentioned above, Applications don’t need to be listed in the Directory in order to be used. There are already probably thousands of Facebook Applications available to be used right now.

I’ve noticed that the number of total Applications in the Facebook Directory hasn’t changed in the past few weeks, and so I’m guessing that they’ve received so many submissions that they’ve finally reached the point where they temporarily stop accepting new Applications to list.

This is obviously a disappointment to most Facebook Application developers, because the possibility to quickly propagate a newly created Application to a large number of users is gone. The primary way now to do this now is to proactively advertise your Application on a popular website, in order to gain the traction needed so that it eventually self-propagates.

It’ll be interesting to see if new Applications will be accepted in the near future. I predict that it’ll be a few weeks at the very least before we see this; I’m guessing that it’s not at the very top of their list of todos.