There was some buzz last week as the managing partner of Facebook application developer Tyler Projects, Leonard Lin, had his Facebook account suspended.
As you may know, one of your posts in a Facebook group was removed because it was considered to be an advertisement or spam (specifically, an advertisement for an external application). Content that promotes a product, service, or group is always removed from the site. Your account was suspended for these reasons.
However, after a review of your situation, we have decided to allow you a second chance on the site and have since reactivated your account. In order to prevent this from happening in the future, please refrain from posting any such material and remove all outstanding content that violates our Terms of Use. For more information on conduct prohibited by Facebook, please read our Terms of Use, which can be accessed through the “terms” link at the bottom of any Facebook page.
Thanks for your understanding,
Brett
User Operations
Facebook
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This doubtless caused on uproar on Tyler’s facebook application BattleStations where Leonard is active in game development and on the discussion boards (as well as being the public face of BattleStations).
His “infraction”?
Posting a link (accompanying a movie review) to a trailer for “Wanted” on a discussion board.
Apparently, Facebook is getting pretty serious with it’s ‘walled garden’ concept – that you should do all your stuff within the Facebook.com domain.
If you haven’t had a chance to look at the Facebook “terms of service” that Brett was refering to, click on the “Terms” link at the bottom of each Facebook page.
A number of the terms look pretty nefarious. (more…)
Twitter continues to be log-jammed, and I think every social network – MySpace, Facebook, MyBlogLog, all go through this phase.
In the case of MySpace, it’s become the hotbed of unmoderated bulletin spam and private message spam for ringtones, free ipod/xbox360/nintendo WII email/zip submit offers. I bet it’s going to take some doing to clear all that muck.
With Facebook, they’re taken the opposite tack of placing a cap on the number of private messages you can send out, limiting the ability of popular group owners to communicate with their members – forcing some to set up off-site bulletin boards to send broadcast messages out.
With MyBlogLog, the platform has a built a good userbase with its blog widget (though guys like Shoemoney had showed that it was pretty easy to abuse the “recent visitors” feature of it). The major sticking point is that Yahoo! doesn’t seem to have a concrete social media strategy (or at least an integrated one in place). I’m still hoping to see some of its community features like it’s Yahoo! Groups, Yahoo! Shopping, Mash social platform and MyBlogLog properties come together. And in my book, come together means more than a single unified Yahoo! login to tie the pieces together.
Even a 1-2 page weekly or bi-weekly updates or “What’s Hawt!” newsletter would serve to bring some of the pieces together…
So what’s the deal with Twitter’s sputtering and throttling down the flow of data?
If you’ve been following the MyBlogLog blog and read the entry on the latest changes, you’d notice that the interface has undergone a number of changes:
With the change, MyBlogLog has moved from being a blog aggregator to being a Web 2.0 content aggregator of sorts. It’s supposed to be able to pull in updates from twitter, myspace, jaiku, flikr, linkedin, etc (a total of 43 services) and present them in a “New With Me” tab.
This past Wednesday I joined a number of Facebook Application developers and sponsors on a “Marketing and Monetization of Facebook Applications: Hype or Goldmine?” at the second Singapore Facebook Developers Garage organized by the Entrepreneur 27 Singapore and Singapore PHP users group.
The panelists included:
Bernard Leong (Thymos Capital partner, and session moderator)
Leonard Lin (TYLER Projects managing partner – developer of Facebook application BattleStations!)
Kien Lee (Senatus founder – an investment holding company which owns more than 100 Facebook applications)
Talking to a number of budding entrepreneur’s at last evening’s Singapore Facebook Developers Garage and hearing about their growing pains served as an impetus to get this post out. Some of you whom I met up with at Affiliate Summit would have heard parts of this, but here it is in more detail…
No matter whether you live in Las Vegas, or Vancouver, BC, New York city or Singapore, the questions are the same – How do you grow your business?
I’m going to outline 3 discrete stages that I see business go through, and I’m going to paint some generalizations here. (generalizations refer to 90-95% of the people in each of these categories out there. So hold off on the flames, especially if you’re part of the 5-10% of “distribution curve busters” out there)
If you’ve spoken to me or exchanged emails, you’ll know that I’m a pragmatist at heart. Having see the rise of the dotcoms and dot-crashes soon after, I’m certainly not in this application if the end result of facebook monetization is mere “hype”.
Talking to Jason Bailey, whom I’m helping to launch his $uperRewards FB monetization system, I’ve seen the applications and case studies of successful FB applications which are making $100,000 – $200,000 a month.
These applications are probably in the top 5% of Facebook applications that turn a profit and a huge profit at that…and the reality of any capitalist society is that you must benchmark yourself against benchmark yourself against the leaders, rather than the other 90% of Facebook developers who are merely scrambling to find two nickels to rub together…
A business must be able to generate positive cashflow and must be able to sustain a comfortable lifestyle for the application creators. Anything less and you’re running a charity.
Let’s break this down for a moment…
An “average” application might generate $10,000 to $15,000 a month, which could be fairly reasonable…until you break that $15,000 by 30 days, or $500 a day.
$15,000 a month or $500 a day, with an assumption of 50,000 daily active users means you are generating 1 cent per daily user…that’s pretty pathetic…
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Instead, if you want to go big with Facebook Applications, you need to define your goal and reverse engineer the process.
I think $100,000 per month is a decent benchmark. (as a starting point…)
This past Wednesday I joined a number of Facebook Application developers and sponsors on a “Marketing and Monetization of Facebook Applications: Hype or Goldmine?” at the second Singapore Facebook Developers Garage organized by the 
