Facebook Apps: Fact or Fad?

I may be slow, but I just discovered Adonomics. It tracks active users for various Facebook applications over time and also their valuation. For companies with multiple apps, it aggregates the apps together so you can see how the company is doing over all.

The recent word on the street is that the top apps are sliding in active user count, so the doom-sayers are calling FB App fatigue and calling for the demise of the fad.

I’m neither optimistic nor pessimistic of the Facebook app eco-system. It’s just one of the many eco-systems out there. The web is an eco-system. The mobile platform is an eco-system. Facebook is an eco-system. OpenSocial is an eco-system. MySpace is an eco-system. A business cannot be built on Facebook alone. For a business to be successful, there must be a strategy that cuts across all the available eco-systems and not have the business’ long term survival live or die by whether is a fact of life or a fad that will soon come to pass.