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Facebook Announces App Center
An anonymous reader writes "Facebook today announced the App Center. Whether you're a Facebook user or a third-party developer, think of it like the Apple App Store or the Google Play store, but for Facebook. That's right: while in-app purchases have existed for a while, Facebook will now give developers the option to offer paid apps (users will pay a flat fee to use an app on facebook.com)."
... we hate facebook apps!
sig has been sent away for a few small repairs...
It'll just be like running apps on your very own computer, except these will be slower, and only usable at the whim of a third party, and will send every action you take to marketers and data-miners, and won't offer as much functionality.
Brilliant!
That guy who wrote cow clicker is going to be a millionaire. Joke's on you pal, you made fun of facebook and wrote cow clicker. Now it is going to make you a millionaire.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I wonder if they will work on your mobile devices.
They'll be all like, "Yo Dawg, I put an app in your app so you can facebook while you facebook."
Dead horse, stick, go.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Seems odd but im guessing they had a reason for it.
apps (and app stores) are all the rage now... This is to lure unsuspecting investors who don't know this is a gimmick.
Because I'm tired of manually blocking app requests. If I wanted to run apps, I wouldn't be on FB. I'd be on a general purpose computer. You know, the kind that runs applications.
There isnt going to be a shortage of investors.
Despite a lot of the rhetoric/slashdot hate, facebook is a successful company that makes money in a now proven way of internet advertising.
There may be a dotcom bubble brewing with a lot of companies that will implode, facebook isnt one of them.
The main reason for the IPO is to reward the people that own the company now and comply with laws, it isnt for the cash that will be raised.
And in the Facebook, block them
I can only hope ... rather than having to block every request for space chicken or karma wars or castle food growers or whatnot
That is all.
It blows my mind to think just how much wasteful effort has gone into making the same applications work on the iPhone, iPad, Android phones, Android tablets, and also for Chrome apps, regular webapps, now Facebook Apps, and next time it would be WinPhone apps.
Another freaking walled garden. Now we will have 3 major walled gardens (Apple's, Google's, and Facebook's) and soon Microsoft will join in as well. Is that what passes as "innovative" nowadays?
Apps are not the future. They are the past.
Webapps or just web pages, as we used to call them, are the future of software. You just enter an address or click a link and you get to the most up to date "app". No installation, no updates, no permissions, no specific OS or hardware or platform necessary. It works everywhere by everyone and all the time with no hassles.
The reason apps made a comeback is because you can charge for apps. An app is a defined thing and an installation is a chargeable privilege. So thank Apple and all the me-too followers for burdening us with software deployment and management just as we were about to escape those unnecessary activities.
Apps as platform is not driven by mobile OSes, browsers, social networking sites, or other modern technology. It is driven by capitalism.
So don't get sucked into yet another walled garden.
Apps are not the future. They are the past.
There may be a dotcom bubble brewing with a lot of companies that will implode, facebook isnt one of them.
I wouldn't be so sure. Social networking is based almost entirely on Metcalf's law. The reason Facebook has value is that people use Facebook. But social networks are trend-based. And people hate Facebook. They only use it because their friends use it and vice versa; again, Metcalf's law. All it takes for Facebook to dry up and blow away is for something that doesn't initially look like a social network, which Facebook can't quickly replicate, to garner a critical mass of users and then let people realize that the thing they and their friends now all have can also be used as a Facebook replacement, and suddenly Facebook is Myspace.
The main reason for the IPO is to reward the people that own the company now and comply with laws, it isnt for the cash that will be raised.
Which is a huge red flag. If a company is issuing stock, not because it actually needs more investors or capital, but instead to create a bigger market for the existing owners to sell their shares and cash out, that is telling you something about the faith of the existing owners in the future value of the company.
Really the problem is this: We are very close to, if not already past, Peak Facebook. Pretty much everyone who wants to be on Facebook already is, so where is the opportunity for growth?
That's why it isn't a normal IPO. The company isn't taking investment capital in order to grow the company; the company is already big. You would be investing in AT&T, not Google-in-2004. Except that you aren't investing in AT&T, because AT&T has tangible physical assets behind it. All Facebook has is tons and tons of users -- but it doesn't own the users. They don't belong to it, and they can migrate away from Facebook as fast as they arrived. In other words, it's a company you would be paying a lot to invest in, which doesn't have an obvious path to additional growth, and which is in a high-risk market with a substantial possibility that it will lose its user base in the medium to long term and thereby become effectively worthless.
That's not something I would pay a lot of money to invest in.
Actually, the downward spiral of Facebook started on February 4th 2004.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
I wouldn't be so sure. Social networking is based almost entirely on Metcalf's law. The reason Facebook has value is that people use Facebook. But social networks are trend-based. And people hate Facebook. They only use it because their friends use it and vice versa; again, Metcalf's law.
You know the only difference between Facebook on the web today and Microsoft on the desktop in the 90s is that businesses (and sometimes the government) required Windows/Office and familiarity with it. Given adequate ubiquity, there's a large possibility [1] that this [2] could occur [3]... once it becomes de-facto standard, good luck getting rid of it.
[1] http://www.pcworld.com/article/240646/spotify_adds_facebook_requirement_angering_users.html
[2] http://www.slashgear.com/facebook-access-becoming-mandatory-part-of-job-college-applications-06217136/
[3] http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-501465_162-20027837-501465.html
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I see your point. But then why are apps so popular? Why do people install a hundred different apps to access websites (e.g. wsj.com) instead of just using the browser to do the same?
1. Profit (take a cut from sale of paid apps)
2. Profit (take a cut from in-app purchases)
3. Profit (collect and sell usage data)
4. Profit (sell stock publicly with record setting IPO)
5. ???
6. Profit!
Facebook is going public because it has too many shareholders. Securities and Exchange Commission rule from 1964 that says that any private company with more than 500 "shareholders of record" must adhere to the same financial disclosure requirements that public companies do.
I'll never use facebook.
You know the only difference between Facebook on the web today and Microsoft on the desktop in the 90s is that businesses (and sometimes the government) required Windows/Office and familiarity with it.
Only if by "the only difference" you mean "only one of the numerous, important differences."
Facebook is not an operating system. They don't get to decide the set of APIs web developers are allowed to use and EEE all the standards so that apps developed for Facebook can't be ported to anything else. The typical "Facebook" app is 95+% bog standard HTML and JavaScript (if not Flash), and the rest is generally just a user authentication hook which can trivially be swapped out for The Next Big Thing when the time comes. On top of that, developers aren't stupid -- nobody wants another Microsoft -- so anyone worth their salt will be designing their apps with the eventual death of Facebook in mind, so that the app itself will still be valuable even when Facebook is dead and gone. In other words, good developers will be on the look out for lock in, and avoid it like the plague.
Ironically, all of the articles you linked support the resistance to Facebook, and the problems Facebook is having. The Facebook requirement for Spotify has been widely panned by everyone and the work-around everyone is suggesting is to create a fake Facebook account and use it as a Spotify account. In theory that makes people more dependent on Facebook, but not by very much, and the value that sort of arrangement actually has to Facebook seems vanishingly small. The demands of employers to see your Facebook has spawned proposals for legislation to prohibit them from asking that, and in the meantime the threat of employers seeing what you post will have a deterrent effect on what people are willing to post, reducing Facebook usage. The Obama proposal for an internet ID is actually an existential threat to Facebook, because there is literally no chance that mandating Facebook itself would result in anything but a political firestorm, but mandating something other than Facebook would create an instant, huge Facebook "competitor" in the sense that from then on no one would ever have to use Facebook instead of the legally-mandated ID for user authentication, which would give network effects to all and sundry little services that no longer need to convince anyone to sign up for a separate "account" or use Facebook for authentication.
If they work on your mobile devices Apple and Google will ban Facebook from their appstores.
So now facebook is AOL? I guess for many people, if it isn't on facebook, it just doesn't exist.
Facebook is not an operating system.
By being a defacto-required identity provider, they are a very important platform - look at Dropbox or Skype for examples on how important and ubiquitous these tools are.
Operating systems, internet file systems, chat/presence, search engines... they are all platforms. Sure you can compete with Facebook quite successfully, but if you don't intend to, why do it? If your business/startup can benefit (or even profit) from Facebook ID (and social graph), and by outsourcing what's not critical, you can get a leg up on *your* competitors and benefit your customers who likely don't doesn't care about Facebook's dominance (or might even be happier since they can "share seamlessly").
As a user, I've benefited from a dropbox-enabled tool - 1Password, to manage my passwords across all my devices - because Dropbox makes it simple. 1Password does not (yet) compete with Dropbox, so it's a win for them as well.
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Operating systems, internet file systems, chat/presence, search engines... they are all platforms.
But they aren't the same kind of platform. An operating system provides a wide diversity of things to developers: Filesystem access, threads and locking primitives, networking support, a GUI framework, etc. Things that get ingrained deep down in the fine details of a piece of software. And Windows does all of those things using very different APIs than any other operating system.
Facebook doesn't have that level of breadth. User authentication is a single thing that can easily be cordoned off and made modular, so that you can support multiple authentication methods -- which is generally what your users will want anyway, because in many cases people don't want their "real name" associated with every single thing they do on the internet.
Notice that I'm not saying that Facebook is useless. You can use their APIs if they're useful (though again, you risk pissing off your users who don't want separate aspects of their lives correlated like that). But they're nothing special. The platform isn't what provides the value, it's the users. And the users can move to a different platform very quickly under the right circumstances.
There are really only two ways for Facebook to avoid this. The first is by being The Best Social Platform, permanently, and never letting anyone else offer anything they don't. Which is fine so long as they can keep it up, but it isn't really their strong suit; it took Google implementing circles to get them to do something similar even though the idea is totally obvious and incredibly useful. Which leaves the other alternative, going Full Evil and trying to be Microsoft, creating a bunch of proprietary standards that only work with Facebook, intentionally coding malformed implementations of open standards, etc. But I find it hard to believe that would work in the long term: Look at where it has gotten Microsoft. Still huge, but slowly dying and with everyone hating them and cheering their demise. And at the same time, because of Microsoft, everyone is now wary of New Microsofts and not having this happen to them by foolishly embracing non-standard proprietary technologies. More than that, it's questionable whether Facebook has enough market power to get away with it -- if they start locking everything down and pissing people off, I imagine Google+ would be happy for the new converts.
Buying listed shares isn't about fast growth for the majority of investors (which are institutional investors such as pensions and insurance).
Investing into listed shares is about the portfolio, not individual shareholdings. The objective for the portfolio is the specified combination of risk & return. People tend to say it's about maximising return for a given level of risk, but that's not really true because what they tend to actually be looking for is, say, coming out 10 years later with something approximating an 8% annual return - which is a lot more like minimising risk for a given level of return.
What a large part of it turns into, it isn't about the risk & reward associated with a specific shareholding. It's about what happens when you combine it into the entire portfolio. Exposure in a specific sector, and then betas. FB has some attraction even if it's just to hedge against your big Google holding.
If you're looking to sink a significant chunk into few companies for a big return, main markets generally aren't the way to go. You're going against players with vast amounts of money and resources. Consider instead looking at alternative investment markets where fledgling companies first go for some public cash. Much higher risk but also much more reward, and it helps that there's fewer other buyers - partly because the really big boys, the pensions etc, are often forbidden from investing.
Buying listed shares isn't about fast growth for the majority of investors (which are institutional investors such as pensions and insurance).
Investing into listed shares is about the portfolio, not individual shareholdings. The objective for the portfolio is the specified combination of risk & return. People tend to say it's about maximising return for a given level of risk, but that's not really true because what they tend to actually be looking for is, say, coming out 10 years later with something approximating an 8% annual return - which is a lot more like minimising risk for a given level of return.
I understand that. What I'm saying is that Facebook is in a precarious position right now. They don't have a lot of growth potential, but they have a lot of risk e.g. if Google+ takes off, or Apple starts a social network, or some startup comes along and eats their lunch. They're in a market where fortunes change overnight. And with that level of risk, you would expect to at least have a high level of growth...but they're already big. So you end up with a stock which is high risk without high growth.
Of course, if you believe the efficient market hypothesis then it doesn't matter, because the market will value the shares consistent with their risk adjusted return. But the efficient market hypothesis only works if people disregard it... and more to the point, the amount of hype behind the Facebook IPO is epic, making it more likely that the company will be overvalued.
FB has some attraction even if it's just to hedge against your big Google holding.
Sort of... the trouble is that Google is fairly diversified (search, maps, docs/drive, gmail, YouTube, Android, Google+, etc.), so anything that seriously hurts them is likely to be a general industry-wide phenomenon that would hurt Facebook just as much if not more.
All that said, I'm not saying that Facebook is guaranteed to die off in short order. If they end up worth a few times as much in five years as they are now, I wouldn't be particularly surprised -- but if they're worth less than Myspace in five years, I wouldn't be particularly surprised either. The point is that there is a lot of risk, and not necessarily a lot of upside -- if they grow significantly it will have to be by entering new markets, and they haven't proven that they can execute on that.