A economia no Facebook

Depois de uma análise à economia no Second Life, que tal uma aproximação ao mesmo fenómeno mas desta vez nos social networking sites, como o Facebook? Este SNS distingue-se por ter sido o primeiro a "abrir as portas" aos hackers para desenvolverem aplicações para os seus utilizadores e, com isso, ganharem dinheiro. No entanto, como é que um widget se pode tornar lucrativo?

O artigo
The Facebook economy
The No. 2 social network is fast evolving into a new kind of software platform - and the race is on to figure out how to turn users' every move into dollars for enterprising developers.

By Lindsay Blakely and Michael V. Copeland, Business 2.0 Magazine
August 23 2007: 7:31 AM EDT

Talk about a killer app. Two years ago Jia Shen and Lance Tokuda wrote, just for fun, a goofy Web application for MySpace that could turn anyone's photos into live-action slide shows. It succeeded - horribly. Within days of its launch, hordes of users at the then-superhot social network discovered the app, added it to their profiles, and communicated it to their friends. It spread like a case of Ebola at the Super Bowl. Within a month Shen and Tokuda had 100,000 users, and traffic was doubling every 24 hours.
The servers - those digital canaries in the mine shaft - crashed, and crashed again. "It was crazy," Shen says. "We were down 17 of the first 30 days." Then it got worse. With traffic peaking at 1.5 million users, server costs topped $20,000 a month. And there was no way to monetize their creation.
Still, they soldiered on for more than a year, keeping afloat with tens of thousands of dollars in loans while hoping to figure out a way to turn their enormous fan base into a brilliant business. It never happened - at least not on MySpace.
This spring, however, Shen and Tokuda spent a few days porting their MySpace hit over to Facebook. The upstart social network began as a hangout for high school and college students and last September allowed anyone to join.
Eight months later, Facebook did something MySpace still hasn't done: It opened up its network to developers and made it easy for them to make money from their applications. Which is exactly what Shen and Tokuda did when they rewrote their app and let it loose on Facebook.
Two months later, the duo had generated more than $200,000 in ad revenue. By late July they had 14 other apps up and running, with more than 22 million users. "When we started, we had no idea what we were doing," Shen says. "Now we have a whole suite of applications, and that's where our power is."
It's an increasingly common tale as the Facebook economy picks up steam. In just 10 weeks, hundreds of developers launched more than 2,500 new applications, triggering 139 million downloads. While a possible Facebook IPO or acquisition could change things overnight, for the moment it's a free-for-all.

in CNNMoney.com

A citação
"Netscape browsed the Web, Yahoo organized it, Google searched it, and now Facebook has made it social."
- Seth Goldstein, cofundador da pequena loja californiana SocialMedia, responsável criação de alguns widgets de sucesso no Facebook, como o FoodFight e o Happyhour.