"Once upon a time, Facebook released an application platform. There followed a gold rush, a frantic summer where everyone tried to release Facebook applications

"Once upon a time, Facebook released an application platform. There followed a gold rush, a frantic summer where everyone tried to release Facebook applications. Some hit it big, going from zero to millions of users in a matter of weeks. Soon, the number of applications became so large (and Facebook became so good at plugging every spammy hole which applications used and abused to spread) that the rate of success of new apps approached zero. The golden age was over." Actually that's the exact opposite of what happened. A bunch of people did initially make apps that hit 10s of millions of customers really fast, but they had no way to monetize and profited very little. Then new apps figured out how to monetize, and even growing at more reasonable (but still fast) rates, began to make a fortune. Now new apps conquer the network almost monthly now and make assloads of money. True, they're not business utilities, but neither are most of the phone ones. In both cases it's games that are winning, and will be winning 5 years from now. Facebook may be a toy, but so is an iPhone. The iPhone app store is probably the only one where you can make big bucks, and it's a total crapshoot. Hundreds of apps drop each day, 99.9% of them amount to nothing but months of wasted development time. And the few apps that do make a big bang are almost all entertainment-related.