VentureBeat did a story on how the early bird advantage with Facebook apps is helping out Slide, RockYou and HotOrNot to steadily increase their traffic. Although, like the article suggests, the data may not reflect the actual contributions that facebook has made to the traffic growth for these young startups - primarily because they have been on a growth mode and gobbling up every opportunity to grow for sometime now.

I personally like the Facebook (fb, if you may) idea of opening up their portal to create a Virtual OS base for third-party applications but still think there is distance to go for them.

Couple of things :

- Facebook does not seem to have a targeted advertisement strategy woven deeply into Individual User profiles. The Only viable creative thing they did with campaigns was “Facebook Flyers” - if we ignore the fact that I could as well walk up to the bulletin boards of nearby Schools to avoid shelling big bucks to a campaign with so-so conversion tracking tools. Even their banner ads just donot cut it for me. The closest relevant thing that I clicked on was an electronics provider. That might sound pretty good if I did not tell you the rest - Hilton Hotels while looking at friends (just in case I felt the rush to visit one, ummm…), KnowHow2Go on my profile page (In case I felt like going back to college, ignoring the fact that I graduated 4 years ago) and Hairspray Ringtones on my new friend, Michael Parekh’s page (I mean …come onnn, every guy with good-looking hair does not use a hairspray !?!).

- Facebook throttled the viral growth potential for third party application providers by limiting the number of people a user could invite to try out an application at a time. I totally understand the performance concerns (not to mention the ‘Thunder stealer’ factor) that led to this decision but I feel the chop down from ALL to 10 is too much.

- Facebook does not seem to have a great video sharing strategy , atleast not an obvious one, either as a self-built application or a third party tie-up with YouTube, Meta cafe, Bright Cove or any of those hordes of video sites of there. I personally would like to see if Facebook can make it easy for their College going core audience to develop a quick video introduction (atleast an audio, may be ?) to their profile or resume - and make it easy and convincing enough for most people to try it out. Now, THAT is something no social network has done so far !