In Other News
In the platform wars between Facebook on the one side and MySpace, Google, and the whole OpenSocial crew on the other, the side that makes it easier for application developers to make the most money will win. Advertising in social networks has always been problematic, and with an advertising recession upon us those already-low ad rates are going to get lower, not higher. The other way to make money on these platforms is to try to charge for apps themselves or sell things through the apps.
Teach the People - The People Powered University from Jason Beckerman on Vimeo. Facebook users can now vote on their favorite of 25 third-party applications, that the company and its investors have selected to be eligible for $225,000 each in funding. It's the latest stage of the fbFund program, designed by Facebook to give the most.
Citizen Sports Inc., a San Francisco-based company that builds sports-focused applications for social networks spanning Facebook, MySpace and hi5, has just acquired app developers Sportacular, Sport Interactiva and FantasyBook. The newly formed trio will expand Citizen Sports' offerings across existing platforms. Apps include fantasy sports (Fantasy Football 2008 on Facebook is Citizen Sports' top-ranked app)
For people tracking the rise and fall of applications on Facebook, a new option is now available: AppData, an analytics site created by Justin Smith, a product manager at app company Watercooler and founder of the blog InsideFacebook. It makes basic data publicly available, including daily changes in application traffic. Facebook itself now only displays.
Next to chanting 'developers, developers, developers' once again at a Sydney developer conference, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has stated that he thought the idea of using open source application framework WebKit as the rendering engine for Internet Explorer (and its mobile sister) was "interesting" and that the company "may look at that."According To Techworld, Ballmer said:"Open source is interesting.
