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Facebook made several important announcements to kickoff its F8 developer conference this afternoon: the launch of Facebook Connect, the Great Apps program for preferred applications, and the ability for developers to translate their applications into different languages. However, a few things that developers and onlookers thought Facebook might announce didn’t come to pass. Here’s a look at a few of them:
Payment System – There was a fair amount of speculation that Facebook would announce a payment system to allow developers to monetize their applications. Facebook made no mention of this, and didn’t touch on monetization throughout the keynote. [img src="http://sale-online.click/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/fbconnect.gif" caption="" credit="" alt=""] Meanwhile, some developers are already starting to integrate their own payment options, including Playfish, which I profiled this morning.
Advertising Program for Developers – While Facebook has made it clear that no advertising will be permitted outside of application canvas pages in a new set of platform policies issued earlier this week, there was no announcement of plans for Facebook to launch its own revenue share program for developers to monetize their apps. This is good news for the dozens of advertising networks currently selling inventory for developers.
Support for OpenID – Following MySpace’s announcement yesterday that they will support OpenID, it seemed possible that Facebook may at least become an identity provider, if not the first big social network to actually let users login using the standard. No such announcement was made.
Finances – While Facebook shared a lot of numbers, including announcing that it has passed 90 million active users worldwide, there was no mention of the company’s overall financial performance. However, they did note that more than $200 million has been invested in Facebook application developers - $34 million of which came this week with venture capital investments in Zynga and LivingSocial.