Well, it’s more like a battleground, but that’s all semantics.
Be sure to check out my latest contribution to AdAge’s DigitalNext, about how the next great war for Facebook app supremacy will not be fought over branded apps, but rather, over behind-the-scenes ones. Here’s a brief excerpt:
We’ve witnessed zombies, vampires, sheep, parking spaces, kidnapping, pushpins and hundreds and hundreds of other silly Facebook apps take our time and waste it like nothing in recent history.
But ever since Facebook’s redesign, those apps have been relegated to other sections, and their popularity has waned. It’s become tougher for developers to launch new apps successfully, and even tougher than that for brands to do the same.
But don’t be so quick to write Facebook apps off just yet. There is a new breed of app that may very well be more powerful than several poking and parking apps combined — and draw even more attention to Facebook’s split personality as both a media property and a platform.
Facebook Connect has actually made Facebook apps more important than ever. But these apps are a different breed. They are meant to facilitate connections, not waste your time. It’s what they help you do, not what they do themselves, and they represent the first entrants into the next great Facebook app war.