The burgeoning social-networking site, Facebook, is attracting the attention of software developers looking to piggyback on the website’s recent success. According to the New York Times, Facebook has offered its vast market as way for developers to make money. The key to the bank lies in applications or “apps” as the hipsters that use Facebook call them. Applications are little side programs that allow users to challenge their friends to online games (such as the increasingly popular Jetman) or share their music preferences in a more interactive way. Applications earn money through advertisements and links on the actual Facebook site and through the increased traffic to their websites. Several facets of Facebook make it attractive for advertisers and thus developers. For one, there is a large flow of users, many of whom visit the site multiple times daily, but this is still not as substantial as MySpace or Yahoo. The real allure lies in being able to tailor advertisements to a specific demographic based on the information users supply to Facebook and to the increased connectedness a social-networking site offers.

A few weeks ago, melodiadorata discussed the graphing of Facebook as an informational network, and I would like to take a closer look at the relationship between applications in the network. One of the issues raised in the NYT article is that many of the advertisements on an application’s page is for other applications. So in the network, the applications, which are already dependent on Facebook as a starting node, are also dependent on the welfare of each another.

However, these potential downfalls have not deterred many developers and entrepreneurs who are jumping at the chance to cash in on Facebook’s growth and willing to take their chances by entangling their investments in Facebook’s inevitable rise or fall. So, be on the lookout for a wave of applications just itching to help you put off that problem set for at least another 20-30 minutes.