Facebook apps -- Where to from here?

Lots of people have blogged and written about Facebook apps. Some are Facebook-lovers, and some bash it to no end. The camps are clearly divided.

I want to venture out and predict that the brouhaha about facebook apps is going to dwindle down soon. The same excitement may or may not carry over to other social platforms -- my guess is that the excitement level will be lower and shorter-lived. I also think that the applications on facebook will eventually be just about mindshare -- and in order to build their fortresses, the bigger players will buy out the smaller players. A lot of apps on Facebook run into scaling problems -- I've run into several that are now unavailable or are on hold because of scaling problems. Several other developers have made their apps available for sale on the developer forum. The reasons most often cited is a variant of "I don't have time to support it."

Eventually, there will be consolidation of apps into a few strong players. The winners have pretty much already appeared -- Social media, Rock you, Slide. The application space on Facebook will be essentially an ad network -- which is indeed all successful apps are focusing on.

There will still be a large bunch of apps that will run on their own. But these will be those that don't rely on Facebook audience to click on ads to survive -- either they are an offshoot of a larger non-facebook product, or they have have an inbuilt business model that helps it survive.