When thousands of people got daily invites to stupid apps, something had to be done. Regardless of whether facebook had ever announced the verified apps program, the new restrictions would make sense.
When you develop for a young platform (particularly a proprietary one) you should realize it may be a moving target. It's far from extortion!
The new restrictions certainly made sense when they took average apps from infinite invites per day down to 20. But dropping that 20 back to 12, then charging you to get back to 20 doesn't help users in any way.
If it were more money he might have a better case. But given other platforms cost thousands of dollars (Sony's Playstation program for example) I don't see $375 as that much of a hardship.
If they just said "everyone has to pay us $375/yr once they get over 10k installs" or something, I'd be way happier about making that payment.
Try Googling for Zynga Revenues. The Facebook platform is orders of magnitude more profitable than iPhone.
Don't mistake buzz for profitability.
I can't up vote you enough. Almost tempted to create new HN accounts just to up vote you.
That adds up fast, since the platform makes it not too hard to get to hundreds of thousands (or even millions) of pageviews a day. 1m page views per day at 50 cents eCPM is still $182k per year. Not a bad second income stream.
1. How are Facebook apps monetized? Advertising?
2. What do applications use the collected user data for? I once saw a description of the kind of access an application gets to the user's data, and it seemed a bit daunting.
2. You can't really "collect" the data. Facebook's Terms state that you can't keep user data for longer than 24 hours. The original idea was that you could use their data to display demographically-relevant ads.
Ouch. And that can't be something Apple is looking for either.
