AppMrkt: Capitalizing On The FaceBook Economy

Many people are aware that FaceBook has generated its own little economy in allowing third party applications to prosper on its web site. FaceBook users click the ads that show when they use an application. Some of them even pay for the thing the application does (like those $1 a gift virtual trinkets). The more popular an application is on FaceBook these days, the more valuable it is. Enter AppMrkt.

AppMrkt is designed to be a place for people to buy and sell FaceBook applications. It works like a casual auction. An application is listed, receives bids, and goes to the highest bidder – like eBay for the FaceBook junkie set (in fact the AppMrkt site uses eBay's Proxy System as its base).

The site limits the amount of editing that can be done to a 24 hour window to help prevent fraud and cold feet. Much like eBay, it offers both an auction format and a Buy It Now feature, as well as reserve pricing and other familiar eBay-like items. They accept standard web payment services such as PayPal and Escrow.com, though they recommend PayPal.

The site suffers from a sense of plainness. I think they were going for a FaceBook-like interface, stripped down and streamlined. Instead they got boring and drab. and they need to fire their logo designer – it looks like no one cared to do more than type in a company name and choose a font, then hit "publish" on a "WYSIWIG" build-your-own web page site.

One feature they don't offer is help finding a value for the application a developer may be trying to sell. FaceBook stumbled onto success monetizing its site through third party applications with no concrete business plan, and continues to muddle through as a highly sought after investment in spite of this. AppMrkt seems to have based an entire site around a similar shaky business plan, or lack there of: the theory that if you build it, the money will follow. This is risky, at best. Then they add potential problems by not offering developers help making a realistic valuation of their company. This only serves to contribute to the overall problem looming in Web 2.0 land – at which point are the applications over valued, causing another bubble to burst?