RockYou, a leading innovator in Facebook applications, has a new reason to gloat. Why, you ask? Did they announce record quarterly earnings? Did their stock price soar and their market capitalization trounce that of their competitors? Did they complete a key acquisition that will propel the company into a new market space?

Alas no, for this is Web 2.0. RockYou's current claim to fame is that their Facebook App Super Wall has taken the lead as #1 Facebook App, over Slide's FunWall.

Today is a great day for American business.

Googlers Suck At Paintball

These are the types of accomplishments you can make with $16.5 million in financing. Slide, on the other hand, has only raise $8 million. No wonder you are #2! All of this information is freely available on CrunchBase, Arrington's shitty "repository" of structured information about Web 2.0 companies (that conveniently does not list revenue but rather total funding because funding now counts as income, evidently).

RockYou now boasts the largest ad network on Facebook, if you don't count, like ya know, like, Facebook itself. Let's focus a little bit on RockYou's advertising, though. If you go to RockYou's Facebook advertisers page, you will notice that the only service RockYou offers is to advertise for other Facebook apps, getting your app 100,000 installs on a single day.

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Okay, so, let's deconstruct this. RockYou makes money by advertising your Facebook app on Facebook, getting your app a bunch of installs. If this is the Facebook app business model, then what you are supposed to do is get enough users such that you can start selling services similar to RockYou. Fuck, this is a pyramid scheme. Getting users for your app can only make you money by virtue of helping other apps get a bunch of users. There is no money input into this system except venture capital.

I remember a time, long long ago, when tech companies spent their own venture capital on eachother, so revenues were all booked from the same small pool of money. Yeah, as I recall, it didn't end well.