Facebook = Opportunity for Entrepreneurs

On 24 May 2007 Facebook opened up their platform to 3rd party developers. This means that for the past 7 months coders and entrepreneurs have been able to create new applications for Facebook. This has resulted in over 14000 new applications -- some of them are useless and will soon die while other applications are really useful to those of us that use Facebook. For example I love the books application -- I am able to load up a record of all the books I have read, am currently reading and still want to read. I am able to write reviews for the books I have read and I get book recommendations (via Amazon) from based on my reading history. In isolation this application has limited power but as I get to see the book reviews and recommendations of some of my friends on Facebook so I get ideas for new books I would like to read and to comment on other peoples reading preferences. It is like an ongoing book club meeting with my best friends (minus the wine and gossip that usually goes with most book club get together). This application may not appeal to everybody but for me -- an avid reader -- it is really cool.

The developers of the books application make money through commissions on books that are sold on Amazon.com via their Facebook application. They get access to a huge user base (Facebook is the 5th most popular website in the USA), I get access to great book recommendations and an insight into what my friends are reading and Facebook have more users spending time on their site as more and more useful applications are added by third party developers (and this results in more targeted advertising revenue for them)

The underlying message here: there is a new economy developing dubbed "THE FACEBOOK ECONOMY". This economy offers excellent opportunities for entrepreneurs from anywhere in the world to to create applications and access a large user base via the internet in order to generate previously ignored revenue streams.

For more on THE FACEBOOK ECONOMY see the recently released Knowledge@Wharton article entitled: "Scrabulous and the New Social Operating System: How Facebook Gave Birth to an Industry"