DustinClingman.com

Anyone who's spoken to me in 2009 has probably had to listen to me posit that Facebook is dead.* My premise, in brief, is that the platform was once a great way to keep in touch with and to develop your social network and rediscover old high school friends, but that pure exhaustion has set in from an onslaught of "friendly" spam and friend requests. This has rendered the platform largely unwieldy unless you need a casual photo and anecdote storage site. Compound this pain with "friends" attempting to approximate interaction by "liking" a post you've made or dropping a lame comment and you've got a terrible way to waste time. BORING! 

With that out of the way, I have to admit that I'm wrong. While I still stand by everything above, I'm incorrect to say that Facebook is dead...It's actually undead. It's been brought back to life and theoretically made "useful" by the large scale usage of popular casual games like Mafia Wars and Farmville.

As the world's only Undead Social Networking site (no MySpace, not you..), Facebook is posting profit in one of the worst economies in recent memory. So how could this be bad?

They're going to slap a mandatory credit usage on virtual currency sales in the platform.

And why does this suck?

Games from Zynga, Playdom, Playfish and others have MADE Facebook a daily desination and are the reason it has reached profitability in such a short time.

It's true that Facebook did create an open ecosystem for developers. (Really they just lured us in with promises that they are now changing) It's also true that folks have made millions off the applications in the form of advertising, direct purchases and virtual good sales. But now in the ultimate show of "Thanks", Facebook wants to "discuss" with major developers about making their own, largely failed, virtual currency "Coins", a standard for the platform...

It wouldn't be so bad if they actually just managed the cash, but the truth is that Facebook is allegedly looking at Zynga's revenues this year (reportedly over 150 million) and is a bit disappointed that they didn't get enough of a taste. It's said that Zynga pours money back into the platform to advertise. But why settle for a few million here or there when you can take 30% off the top? Perhaps some people are not as generous as Mark Pincus with their advertising budgets.

Back at the beginning, Facebook told developers that they could monetize their applications however they could. This got the content they desperately needed and now it's time to turn the screws. In Texas they say you "Dance with who brung ya". Guess that's not true anymore at Facebook. Developers getting screwed. Does this sound familiar?

Both EA and Zynga have taken steps to integrate and insulate themselves respectively by linking via Facebook Connect via their own sites Pogo.com and Farmville.com. Frankly, Farmville has legs and at least another 75-100 million in revenue to earn. Why share that with Facebook if you don't have to? Content is King and I expect other developers to quickly follow suit with standalone sites of their own for heavily played games.

In the end, it's really going to be the second and third wave of developers that are going to feel the brunt of this storm. While the big guys are in position to negotiate themselves into better deals and lower percentage, the small guys will feel a nasty pinch. As is usual, under funded indies get the worst of it. I would really hate to be "the next thing" on Facebook when this change goes into effect.

So thanks Facebook...You asked us to help. Some of us got rich (but not most of us) and now you want to take a bite out of me. No thanks. You can keep your bad UI and your application spam. I'm out!

*It's interesting to note that 3.24% of Facebook users are actually dead.