It is excruciating... people making my point for me.
Look at this.
Rodney, you are missing the entire point here.
- Useful. Yes, think about useful. But you are talking about a platform you are building on here. Have you actually objectively considered the foundations you are building this on? For IT geeks: how well do you think the current market for Visual SlickEdit plug-ins is doing?
- Make connections with data. Again, notice the loud whooshing sound. Rodney, people already have data. Lots of it. And you know what? They are somewhat reluctant to give it to you. Most people are starting to get interested in keeping it safe. Which is why I think Windows Home Server has the potential to be the biggest money-maker for Microsoft in decades. Which, considering their pathological inability to capitalize on what they do well, will never happen. Most people do not keep an address book on their PCs. What makes you think they are willing to share any pertinent information with Facebook?
A bit later, he talks about "don't make me think" for a bit. For the uninitiated, he is referring to the paradigm where you do not make a user worry about things that they do not care about. I think he is missing the point on Facebook at the moment. The focus should not be on what people think about applications that they can install on Facebook if they so choose (for future reference, I have spent an hour on Facebook now and am still blissfully unaware of the existence of applications that you can install in the first place -- and I have been an IT professional for the past 13 years). We are talking about subsections here. Let me cut this down:
- People on the Internet
- People on Facebook
- People that care about Facebook sufficiently to return
- People that are tech-savvy enough to find your application and add it
- People that are looking for what your application does
- People that care so much that might be willing to pay for it
Does this sound like a business model to you? If so, I have some great New Orleans real estate you should look into.
I think the point he is missing is that he is developing for a platform that nobody cares about. He would probably (forgive the straw-man argument here since I have no way of communicating with him -- yet, har har) add "yet". To that sentence. But still, the business proposition has not been made by anyone in the Facebook bubble: why would anyone care? what does this do that I cannot do elsewhere? why, pardon my French, should I give a flying fuck?