New York Times is investigating whether any of the 4000 applications that have been introduced to the Facebook platform by second parties are making money for their inventors.
As far as the paper knows, no one has made a significant sum. Yet, that hasn’t stopped the money from flowing. In fact, one VC is totally dedicated solely to supporting Facebook application developers.
This summer, Lee Lorenzen, a venture capitalist in Monterey, Calif., who describes himself as “the first Facebook-only V.C.,” started a $25 million Facebook investment fund and introduced a Web tool, at Adanomics.com, that assigns a monetary value to Facebook applications.
“It has become very clear this is a huge opportunity,” Mr. Lorenzen said. “It is very simple in my opinion for small development teams to very quickly build businesses on top of Facebook.”
Facebook apps are made by Facebook’s own team, by geeks in dark basements around the globe and by companies with an existing presence on the interwebs. This last category, in my mind, has the most to gain, for they can find customers on Facebook that they might not have “acquired” otherwise. Flixster, with nine million Facebook “customers,” looks to be one such company.
