Canadian Chick
Makes me proud to be Canadian. Thanks for the submission, Sinning Saint!
Venture capital firms aiming lower
VC firms like Y Combinator, Google Gadget Ventures, and Bay Partners are offering funding on a smaller scale for developers. For example, Bay Partners’ AppFactory provides funding for developers of Facebook apps — investments from $25,000 to $250,000. It’s a far cry from the days when VCs wouldn’t pay any attention to your startup unless millions of dollars were involved.
My thoughts on this: if you need that little money for your startup, go with an angel investor or fund it yourself, and retain 100% of your company when you make it big.
Facebook Platform’s greatest asset
I’ve read a lot of posts and comments around the blogosphere that the Facebook Platform is the new AOL. Maybe that’s a little harsh, but it’s not too far from the truth. If the AOL comparison sounds harsh, bear in mind that AOL was successful for a while. 
It still remains to be seen whether the Facebook Platform will blossom into more than a glorified platform for controlled widgets, whether the “Social OS” concept will stick, and whether applications will actually make any money. If there’s a fighting chance, it’ll be from applications that leverage Facebook’s existing user networks. Facebook’s greatest asset is their user database: I would hazard to guess that they have the most accurate and trusted database of personal profiles and relationships on the web. It’s not Identity 2.0 utopia by any means, but it’s the biggest and best database of trust relationships that exists today, and being able to tap into that as a developer is huge.
There’s a lot of hype surrounding Facebook Platform, but you can’t say it’s not warranted.
More photos!
A minor but welcome change: I’ve increased the photo upload limit from 30 to 50. Some of our best contributors were bumping up against that 30 photo limit, and it sucks to have to limit them.
Any other suggestions for changes? Let me know what you guys think!
Your reward for writing a wildly successful Facebook app: $60,000 and a job
This article from Reuters pretty much confirms my belief that it’s hard to make money on Facebook. Despite the massive amount of hype surrounding Facebook applications, a wildly successful Facebook app, like Favorite Peeps with 1.6 million users, is worth a piddling $60,000 and a job at Slide. Granted, it’s not a bad payday considering how much effort was required to build Favorite Peeps, but the developers got in on the ground floor — forget duplicating that kind of success now, because all of the simple ideas for Facebook apps have been done, and creating anything that successful again is going to require a lot more effort.
I’m not sure if the creators of Favorite Peeps or SuperPoke should have sold out to Slide. I can think of a few things to do to innovate and expand those apps to generate more advertising revenue. It’ll be interesting to see what Slide does with Favorite Peeps and SuperPoke to generate revenue. Come to think of it, how does Slide generate revenue? Do they make any money at all??
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