gsp07

How to make money on Facebook: No one knows

On Monday at the Graphing Social Patterns conference, I moderated a panel about making money from Facebook apps, with Giles Goodwin of Widgetbox, Hooman Radfar of Clearspring, and Jeff Nolan of Newsgator. It's a complicated question, especially for companies that have existing Web-based businesses. When do you start work on a Facebook app? Will a Facebook product cannibalize your other Web products? Can an online business survive on Facebook exclusively?

The panel agreed on just about nothing, which is indicative of a market in a very early stage of development. My favorite issue came from an audience question. John Furrier … Read more

New ad networks leverage Facebook's long tail

Let's say you've got a great new Facebook app or widget. Good for you! Too bad no one is going to see it.

Narendra Rocherolle (and a few other entrepreneurs) are trying to rescue your app. Rocherolle launched fbExchange a few months ago with the goal of making the "long tail" of apps work for developers. The idea is that you put a little ad banner on your page, which other apps are pitched on. In exchange, your app gets advertised on other Facebook apps.

You can buy clicks if you have no traffic to feed … Read more

Facebook advice from zombies

Lance Tokuda is the CEO of RockYou, a social network app building company. RockYou makes music and photo sharing apps on Facebook, as well as a very popular "wall" replacement, SuperWall. The app I'm most familiar with, though is Zombies, which I've heard derided as the "multi-level marketing social app" (although, really, isn't that the point?). I tried it for a while but recently uninstalled it since I couldn't get my wife to stop biting my zombie. And not in a good way.

What is the secret of Zombie's success? Lance … Read more