In my next life, I want to be an app developer

Over the past few months, we've seen VC funding solely focusing on Facebook application businesses. In lieu of a long due diligence and endless powerpoint, the process became a simple form to fulfill. Facebook was inventing the fast food side of the VC money. Getting funding became similar to getting a loan. 24 hour approval max. Bad credit welcome :-)

We also had Google claiming to pay up to $5000 per new gadget submitted. Finally, Google decided to not do it.

Last month, Facebook itself thru the voice of its founder, Mark Zuckerberg was announcing at TechCrunch 40 on stage with Mike Arrington, the creation of a $10M Facebook fund to grant, not invest, grant between $25k to $250k your desire in business, featuring a Facebook app, of course.

If the money doesn't do it, the next step is to talk return on investment. Here's the simple idea: if you develop for Facebook, you reach 48M people. Google is planned to announce tomorrow Open Social, an API supposedly adopted by a bunch of social network like Friendster or Hi5, which when adding them all up would make 100M. Use my API and double your reach.

Well, too short Google! at netvibes, we have released our UWA (Universal API) early 07 and have announced 2 weeks ago the direct install to Windows Vista and live.com, which adds to iGoogle, Opera, iPhone and netvibes of course. So, talking numbers: UWA is already reaching 23M of Mac OS and 88M of Vista = 111M not counting iGoogle and netvibes users ;-)

The real point being to be really open. And to that extend, can Open Social claim to be really open when it's not adopted by the 2 major Social networks: mySpace and Facebook?

The real winners, the center of all attention are the application developers. The more they develop apps, the more it enriches the social network and, today, weaken the new $15B gorilla. Must be good to be an application dev these days :-)