Yesterday I attend the Facebook App Developer Meetup. It was a great meeting.

The best part for me was talking to Jason Holloway, CEO of Face It. His company has built 5 of the  top 100 Facebook apps. He has a huge wealth of knowledge on All-Things-Facebook-Apps. If you are interested in hiring his company to build a Facebook app for you, you should know that some of the more sophisticated apps that they build can run into the millions of dollars, and that is just for development. You still need to budget money for maintaining the app over time.

One piece of Facebook news that I was not aware of and that Jason shared with me was that Scabulous, one of the most popular Facebook apps and websites, is being targeted by Hasbro and Mattel, the companies that have the rights to the games in the US and outside the US. Hasbro and Mattel are going after Scabulous to close them down and switch users to their legal versions of the game. I am not sure that the transition is going to work well at all. The big companies are always trying to change the user’s behavior into something that is easier for the company, not the customer. For example, YouthKerala quotes John D. Williams Jr., executive director of the National Scrabble Association as saying

We’re thrilled over anything that gets people playing more Scrabble. Our goal is to recruit them from the Internet and get them playing on a Scrabble board with a person sitting across from them.

Many of the Facebook apps developers in the meeting were on edge. Today f8, the Facebook App Dev conference, is taking place. Facebook is expected to announce a large number of changes to their platform and how apps interact with it. In fact, one developer invited everyone to a hack-a-thon this weekend. The developers will get together and fix the code that will no longer work in their Facebook apps. What else do developers do on beautiful weekends in Silicon Valley than fix code?

Tags: Face It, Facebook, Scabulous

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008 at 12:25 am and is filed under Business Lessons. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.