"The monetization is one of the most unique things they are doing," said Tim O'Shaughnessy, a co-founder and partner at Hungry Machine, which has developed about 15 Facebook applications. "That's what's causing the fervor over the application development. People are looking at the potential to enhance their business. It's not just a distribution play. It can put real dollars in your pocket."
Joseph Aigboboh, co-founder of J-Squared Media, another Facebook developer, agreed. "Facebook has created an opportunity to build literally any product and spread it virally to achieve unprecedented rates of growth and retention. This means that with a relatively cheap budget, companies can build lucrative products and services [and] drive revenue," he wrote in an e-mail.
It's no surprise then that some developers have been overeager in their attempts to boost adoption of their applications and generate revenue, while looking for ways to bend the rules.
This week, Dave Morin, Facebook's senior platform manager, addressed the concerns about annoying and abusive applications in an official blog posting, and announced steps have already been taken, with more coming.
Facebook wants the popularity of applications determined by how useful and entertaining they are. Thus, it's shifting how it measures application popularity in its applications directory away from total users and toward user engagement, he wrote.
Vowing to protect members' experiences on the site, he said the latest release of the Facebook Markup Language -- version 1.1 -- changes how profile boxes display content, removing applications' ability to display profile content to visitors and hide it from profile owners.
The company is also limiting applications' ability to contact members to crack down on spamming of deceptive and misleading notifications.
Facebook's user experience has traditionally been considered significantly more elegant, controlled, and organized than the one from key rival and social-networking leader MySpace.
Although MySpace remains more popular, Facebook has been gaining momentum for the past 12 months. Its user ranks have ballooned to 37 million active users today from 12 million in December. More than half of its active members return to the site daily.
A company called Slide, which creates "widget" applications for social-networking sites and is big on MySpace, jumped on the chance to set up shop on Facebook, which has quickly become one of its most important platforms.
Although Slide has created some of the most popular Facebook applications, its detractors have criticized it for engaging in some of the inappropriate tactics flagged by Morin.
But Slide's CFO Kevin Freedman said that Slide is as interested as anyone else in providing a good user experience on Facebook and elsewhere.
"We listen to our users' feedback first and foremost. Regarding some of those [critical] comments, we haven't necessarily seen the same response from our users and that's really what drives us," Freedman said.
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