Our Facebook Pitch Video, and Facebook Apps

Facebook in its quest to make money has done a couple things to control and promote good applications.

When the app platform was developed, it went from 0 - 60 in months, everyone wanted to get in on the fastest growing social networking site to make money. Anyone could submit an app and the facebook community could evaluate it. If it was good, it spread far and wide. That's the beauty of social networking.

A lot of bad apps were developed that didn't work, didn't hold true to facebook values or whatever. So facebook started the facebook developers fund. It sounded like a great idea, they'd take applications for funding and then pick the apps that will most likely keep facebook users using facebook, and give them money to make their apps better.

Facebook has also recently started charging a fee to become a "verified developer". This is $375 per year and you go through an evaluation process. The blogs that I've been reading say it's the same thing as an extortion racket and they're offended. One one hand I see their point because it's like the net neutrality issue. If people who have great ideas for apps can't afford or aren't willing to pay, then the users of facebook miss out on something that could potentially be great. Scrabulous would be an example, did those kids in New York know it was going to be huge, and would they have done it if they had to pay? Well, probably, but that doesn't mean others wouldn't have.

I think overall it will keep the flakes from putting up bad apps that I try out for a day or two and then delete, continually wading through the massive tides of unfinished, untested and plain crappy apps.

I think we should rely on user feedback and reccomendations instead of a fee to facebook, but they are a business and I understand.

We created a pitch video to try to get facebook funding. This is before we changed our branding to Oistr. I think we did a pretty good job. We didn't get the funding though.