Meebo Launches Battle For Developers Among Social Networks - Developers Face Platform Fragmentation Costs

Posted by Tom Foremski - October 29, 2007

Meebo, the chat social network company, celebrated its 2nd birthday Monday and launched an initiative that offers a generous revenue split with developers.

Unlike Facebook, which has thousands of developers but doesn't have a monetization infrastructure, Meebo is offering a 50/50 split with developers. And unlike Facebook, which welcomes any developers, Meebo says it will be very selective.

Calling all developers!
meebo is opening up its doors to developers and we'd love for you to help us create awesome multi-user applications that meebo users can use to connect to their friends.

http://wwwl.meebo.com/platform/

Foremski's Take: It's a good move because it ups the stakes in the battle to win developers that every social network platform faces. Without great applications, social networks believe that they will lose users. Meebo is limiting the number of developers into its market which means they have a better chance of making money than at Facebook where thousands of developers are competing (and annoying users).

Meebo's move will encourage other social networks to make competitive offers. Microsoft, for example, offers its Popfly development platform for free to developers, which includes commercial rights.

Developers are in demand, but these days they face the expense of developing for many different platforms, and supporting those applications. It is not enough just to launch an application in the online world, it must be monitored, and tweaked, and developed further if it is to be successful.

Also, developers that sign up for revenue sharing with social network sites, might be disappointed by the returns. The large advertising networks such as Google AdSense, Yahoo Publisher Network, and Microsoft, pay very little unless you have very high traffic.

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Technorati Tags: developer war