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the only question I have: How are the developers protected from facebook launching similar products when their product proves that it makes money or draws a lot of traffic?

Edit: Fixed

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Even if you don't use facebook's platform, they can still launch similar products. The bigger threat is facebook discontinuing the platform or restricting what you can do, though I doubt they'll do either.

Vaild point, but no need to shout! Theres always a risk when using a platform. There are some ideas that you can do which facebook itself are unlikely to eg mosoto

Good point too! To me this feels like signing up for a franchise instead of starting your own business, you have control, but not full control. For some purposes or ideas it's a great.

Theres an interesting quote in the gigaom article:

one company even telling us it was considering transitioning its current million-plus-user application into being purely a Facebook application.

Sounds like a crazy plan. Is this hotornot possibly?

Now, that would be crazy. How do you make money with that?

Looks like I talked too soon about mosoto. One of te facebook applications is box.net integration which kind makes mosoto redundant.

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