Fart Applications Must Be Profitable but Probably Not Rewarding Enough

Today I have received an email from the creator of iFart, the iPhone application we profiled a few days before Christmas as the application that has generated impressive revenue for its creators - even despite of its dubious nature. The entire technology blogosphere has been very impressed watching the application that does nothing but imitates the fart sound quickly becoming the most popular application in the Apple App Store and generating almost $10,000 daily to its developers. What’s more, there must be hundreds of developers around the world (I personally know two in Russia) who are now trying to come up with similar paradoxical ideas for iPhone applications to quickly improve their financial situations without investing too much time in development.

But while everyone must already know that such overnight success takes lots of factors to combine to make it possible, it now looks that even financially rewarding projects like iFart Mobile application are not everything any developer dreams about and they still strive to come up with something that will also try to revolutionize the world - not only make fun of the world around us. And the creators of iFart, Infomedia, are no exception here either as they have come up with an idea that is supposed to change the game rules for the iPhone apps marketplace - Infomedia MSS.

MSS, or Mobile Syndication Service, is intended to let absolutely everyone have an iPhone application of their own by syndicating the selected types of content from various sources and content types. What’s more, these applications can be submitted to the App Store for iPhone or iPod Touch users to download and buy so everyone can now act like a real developer. Of course it will take the application to be approved by the App Store first and I’m not quite sure how Apple will react to the incoming stream of applications with news from Britney Spears or other pop celebrities but hopefully they will not object very much unless the number of such applications grows to something ridiculous.

The purpose of such applications is pretty obvious: any celebrity, author or politician can deliver the selected content to their fan base or supporters via mobile devices. The content types are numerous - it can be audio, video, calendars, documents, RSS feeds and everything that can be delivered via RSS. And of course these applications will be branded to make them truly unique and provide branded mobile presence for everyone interested.

When writing this I immediately wanted to quickly create something for Profy with the new posts, comments from here or from FriendFeed and maybe some other select sources of industry news. But unfortunately it is not a self-service platform (at least for now) where everyone could quickly develop an iPhone application without any programming knowledge by simply choosing and adding some content and submitting it to Apple for review. Everyone who is interested in this type of service should request a quotation from InfoMedia by providing some initial information. Obviously the price will depend on the requirements of the potential customer and the goals he or she wants to reach. To me this sounds like a wise approach as I believe that the number of applications produced in this manner should still be limited when it comes to the marketplace that involves review and approval of applications.

And while I feel that a self-service platform could be appealing to more people, the idea itself looks like a smart one to me as letting people have their own presence - be it as a blog or as an aggregated view of their internet activity on FriendFeed - is exactly what has been a focus for many companies recently. So why not let people have their strong mobile presence and viral promotion tools on iPhone as well? Especially if this proves to be a revenue stream that could be even more impressive than what they have achieved with their flatulence application. And I can’t help but wonder now if iFart was something of a warm-up for the company or a pre-launch promotional project for the MSS idea. But whatever it is, it is wise anyway.