Battle for social app developers breaks out as Meebo offers rev share

If you are a developer of applications for social networks, you are hot, hot, hot, and about to get hotter. Meebo, the chat social network company, has fired the first shot in a battle among social networks to attract developers to their platform.

Meebo is directly competing with Facebook, Myspace, and many other social network sites for developers to create compelling applicatiopns for their sites. Meebo is competing not on how "open" its API is, but on money.

It is offering a 50/50 revenue share with developers. And it is limiting the number of developers which means if you are one of the chosen, you don't have to compete with dozens of me-too clones.

Nice strategy. Better than Facebook, which takes anyone and doesn't have any payment infrastructure. Facebook developers have to compete against tens of thousands of other Facebook developers which means they won't make much money. (BTW, that's what ZDNet does with its bloggers(!))

Let's see how the other social networks react to Meebo's move, and they will, because they have to.

These might be seem to be good times for developers but they now face high costs of maintaining applications on several different platforms--biting into any profits.

Plus, revenue share with social network sites means splitting Google AdSense, Yahoo Publisher Network, or Microsoft advertising revenue--which wouldn't make you rich even if you kept 100 percent. Social networks that can build their own sales force will do better for themselves and their developer partners, imho.

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