Official Facebook Application thread

i have yet to monitize this app yet i will start the monitization process like i did with my other apps once i receive 10k installs. frogger just launched saturday and will start to expand in december as i will be running a contest all month long and will be giving away some prizes.

all you do it apply for a new facebook api key.

 

is there anyone else currenting running facebook apps other than myself and seeing some success?

 

I am thinking about getting one. Does anyone my good articles to read about facebook apps and marketing and monitizing them?

 

Realdeals228 here is a nice little article about the facebook economy. let me know what you think.

 

Okay,, now i have made an application using html only and it can be installed and it works properly,,, but i can't figure out how to put the invitation link for other friends to use this application!!

What would be the php code for friend invitation?

Thanks

 

doesnt facebook provide info on that?

 

yes you need to go to the facebook developers board. everything is more or les answered there.

 

We've helped a number of Facebook pubs monetize their apps. If you're a MB affiliate, you should have a chat with your affiliate manager.

 

I built and run a number of Facebook apps and I made a bunch of that for clients. Monetizing is difficult; I make money with my own , but really not much, even though I total (all apps) over 28.000 users and thousands of daily users.

More money I make programming FB apps; because we are really fast in building them we can do a short time to market for companies. But still I hope to make $ with the apps themselves.

 

Yes, they are easy to build. The first app I built (rather than my company) took about two weeks. After that it is only a couple of days as they almost all use the same look and feel as to fit the feel of FB and many of the core elements can easily be reused between apps.

My own app is slow to take off but then i dont have any time to do the basic promotion. The two built for friends/ clients are doing better.

There are lots of claims on FB of people getting 100k+ users within days of launch... do people believe this (with their claim of no paid users etc) or think they are talking out their arse?

 

With 'fast', I didn't mean easy; we have an FB team of 3 experienced programmers, 2 testers, a designer and a HTML guy; they make apps fast, but those apps are really specialized and sometimes quite complex (mostly integrated with company back-ends).

About the user-uptake; there is some arse-talking there for sure; less than 600 of > 10.000 apps have more than 100k users. If you are successful you will be doing that, but if you have 100.000 in a few days, you'll be rich fast. So I don't think it is true that many people achieve that.

We are bringing a lot of apps to FB and looking for more ideas (so PM if you have any and we'll do a JV/share), but, even though we have fast growth, it is no-where as fast as some people claim they have. Ofcourse there are folk that really do that, but those apps get famous very fast and they are not 'casual' developers usually.

 

To qualify what I mean by fast, I was referring to the FB integration, certainly if you have a complex mainframe back end to integrate with then it will take time to develop but that is that aspect rather than the FB element that is taking the time - and lets admit it, 99.9% of FB apps arent integrating with complex commercial back end systems.

 

Yeah ; almost all is crap. But I think, to make money on FB (and this goes for the rest of the web too , you need a business to connect to which actually makes money. Just putting CPC, CPM, CPL ads on it makes some $. If you do millions of members then it'll make you a lot, but with < 1.000.000 users you need a serious back-end company and business plan to add to it. I think 99.9% of FB apps don't make a profit at all.

 

This one is a bit buggy, I did it mainly to learn about the FB platform:
http://apps.facebook.com/hotdeals/


This is based on the Battles application from myYearBook:
http://apps.facebook.com/mybattles/

 

interesting apps there. how do you plan on spreading them?

 

Ahhh, that bit is always the challenge (and what I dont have time for).... thankfully our next one to go live (http://apps.facebook.com/hesaysshesays) is for an existing business and the promotion aspect is down to them though as we developed it on a split upfront and revenue share basis it is in our interests for it to do well

 

When you talk about the "HUGE" traffic you get from these applications, I might as well ask................

From your 8 applications how many unique visitors do you estimate that you are getting?

 

Thanks. The "Hot Deals" app was just for testing and learning.

As for the "Battles" app, it's mostly viral. I invited all my friends and it grew from there. I could really improve the news feed items and more aggressively promote the friend invitation, but I don't really have time. I have other projects.

If anyone is interested in buying the app as-is, let me know.

 

i get about 3k+ uniques per app per day.

 

Mother of pearls, that's a lot of traffic for one little cheap thingy in facebook, but still most webmaster wouldn't want to fork the high amount it costs to get one made.