Facebook’s Project Beacon and Project Pandemic could be bad news for App developers

If you’re following TechCrunch you’ve undoubtedly heard about some of the new leaks regarding Facebook’s Tuesday announcements: third party web sites will be able to plug actions into your newsfeed. I think this is really cool because it takes the newsfeed one step closer to a real lifestream of information.

And before you ask, yes that’s different than twitter. The FB feed should be passive - something that runs in the background and logs some of my interesting activities. Twitter is proactive, something that runs in the foreground and creates conversation.

But more interesting than this newsfeed update is the rumors that Facebook will be dropping sponsored groups in favor of sponsored “pages,” which might feature Facebook-authored apps with the same functionality as many of the more popular third-party apps on the platform. According to VentureBeat:

Pending the outcome of an internal debate within Facebook, these pages may include a number of vertical categories, such as movies, music, restaurants, travel, nonprofits, and others.

Facebook has already developed applications for these categories, that we understand to compete directly with many successful third party applications on Facebook already in these categories. Instead of using Flixster to rate movies or iLike to play music games, you may soon find yourself playing Facebook’s version of these applications — then finding yourself getting directed to relevant advertisers’ pages.

Actions users take on these pages will appear within friends’ news feeds — if the advertiser that purchases the page is willing to pay an extra fee. These pages will also have their own URLs, such as www.facebook.com/venturebeat, and will be searchable on the web.

This is precisely the problem that Mitch Kapor outlined at Community Next: as a developer, you can never really trust a closed platform (which Facebook still is), because you run the risk of having your work co-opted.

I’ll be somewhat surprised, though, if Facebook decides to tread on the toes of its top developers now, as OpenSocial is being unveiled and the internet seems to be preparing for some kind of FB goodwill-backlash. But we will see.

Thanks Connie for the link!

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