Facebook's Application Rock Stars
The Community Next conference in San Jose, CA this last weekend resembled the mosh pit at a rock concert. It featured performances by the twenty year-old rock stars and a few older ones who have developed successful applications on the new Facebook applications platform.
Context & Ripple Effects
The Community Next conference is the cultural endpoint of a run that began with Facebook's app feeding frenzy in June 2007, when the platform opened and thousands of developers piled in. By September the question had shifted from novelty to economics, with mainstream coverage asking why so many want to create Facebook applications at all.
October sharpens both sides of that ledger: Zuckerberg used TechCrunch40 to announce the fbFund grant program for developers, while a same-week columnist dismissed much of the catalog as built 'for toddlers rather than adults' — and VentureBeat's August 'Facebook debunked' critique had already questioned whether the hype survives contact with retention numbers. A conference anointing twenty-year-old developers as rock stars is what a gold rush looks like at its celebrity phase.
First-order effects
- Successful application developers gain visibility and deal-making leverage from the conference circuit, with fbFund grants — now reopened for mandatory resubmission — acting as Facebook's direct subsidy of that developer class.
- Facebook itself gets a marketing engine it does not have to pay for: third-party apps keep users on-platform while Flyers gives those same developers a self-serve way to buy the distribution they need.
Second-order effects
- Grant-funded competition raises the bar for unfunded indie developers, pushing them toward whatever viral mechanics win attention rather than durable products — the exact shallowness critics are already flagging.
- Advertisers and brands watching the ecosystem must decide whether Facebook's audience graph, described this week as potentially the biggest and most valuable database in the world, justifies building presence through apps versus plain display buys like Flyers.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, application platforms concentrate power in the gatekeeper: developers own none of the distribution, so their businesses live or die by one company's rules, ranking algorithms, and funding whims.
- Developer ecosystems become a repeatable playbook — open API, grant fund, self-serve ads, conference culture — that other platforms will copy to attract labor before monetization exists.
The trend: Platform economies are entering a frontier-capital phase where the gatekeeper subsidizes a developer gold rush to stock its ecosystem before any real business models settle out.