Picture of our facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg

Mark Zuckerberg’s Keynote Speech at the Facebook F8 Developer Conference was pretty bad, as all of my readers have agreed. He positioned Facebook as a world changing platform for entrepreneurship and developers. He clearly wants to see people build applications off Facebook as if it were an operating system. Is this level of success possible? Sure, but not anytime in the near future. Here’s my take on all this hype about the Facebook developer platform:

I think that we can agree that this is pretty cool, but it is over hyped. Big deal that entrepreneurs can build their applications which have access to facebook’s vast demographic - now the tough part is getting user adoption, catch and keep use, and monetization. Having access to the facebook users simply isn’t enough. Observe the top 25 apps. Notice that none of them are commerce related. They’re all very social (features) that make facebook better for users, but the monetization strategies haven’t been better than ads. Getting users to pay for anything through facebook seems unlikely, and even if people did purchase things over facebook, I don’t see that as being a viable business for most entrepreneurs. These are all very SOCIAL applications; not businesses that you typically see floating around the internet.

And, because of that, while Facebook is a cool platform, I don’t see it as being as amazing as everybody in the entrepreneurship and development community make it seem. Facebook users will certainly enjoy this, but I see many entrepreneurs and developers making apps for nothing more than hobby and personal interest. (with the exception of Slide, RockYou, iLike, Flixter)

I’d love to hear your opinions. Platforms are awesome, but they’re only good if entrepreneurs on that platform can see buyers and real user adoption. Comment away!

Jessica Mah is a 17 year old entrepreneur, blogger, and sophomore in college. She’s currently the founder of a startup, managing editor at Startupism.com and Jessicamah.com.