The Big Business of Tiny Widgets - Page 2

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Leveraging Facebook data

Selling anonymous, aggregated data on users could be a cash cow for Facebook and other large social media application providers, according to Tim O'Shaughnessy, CEO of LivingSocial, maker of tools for discovering and organizing personal interests. "Down the road, with us and everybody, leveraging the data Facebook gives will be an increasingly important revenue stream," said O'Shaughnessy.

"It's real people, their real connections, their real likes and dislikes. There's a lot of data being accumulated but not being leveraged," he added.

For example, millions of searches a month take place on the company's site. He speculated that his company might develop a self-service advertising system where businesses or publishers could buy ads.

And then there's venture money. This week Zynga, a service that combines online casual games with social networking, received $20 million from venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, the firm that financed much of the first dot-com bubble (and saw stellar returns on its investments in a few companies like Google). In fact, Facebook is still running on money from Accel Partners.

Exhibitors at f8 say the thing to remember about Facebook development is that you can make money from your apps, just maybe not a lot. That's seems fine with the crew of hackers and coders here, who just want to pay the rent and keep the fridge full of Red Bull … oh, and maybe, someday, sell themselves to Google.