My love for Facebook Applications is no secret.
There is, however, a shining light in the world of Facebook Applications and that is the smart folks who build custom Facebook applications for other people. The business model is sound: Get paid up front to build a great application and you don’t have to worry about the business model or any of the other nasty stuff that comes along with being stuck inside Facebook.
Refresh Analytics is being launched today and it on the smart side of the Facebook platform. They provide analytics and reporting tools to the owners of Facebook applications. The tool, which is free for applications with less than 1000 users, provides tracking across 13 demographic and 6 interest categories such as geography, gender, age, martial status, music, books and more. All demographic information is collected in aggregate to protect user privacy and respect the Facebook platform terms of service.
Products like this have the potential to be very successful inside of a platform like Facebook. As more and more application developers struggle to make their applications successful, they are going to have to turn to rich data about their user base in order to build compelling and relevant features.
More successful Facebook applications will also want access to better analytics so that they can do a better job of selling ads within their applications, or so that they do a better job of targeting their users with specific messages.
The guys at Refresh have also partnered with Joyent to mitigate any sort of scaling issues. Joyent provides flexible hosting that can grow and reduce capacity as needed. Hopefully they’ll need it!
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