Someone on Twitter followed me over the weekend and sent me an automated Direct Message to click a link to make money by only investing $6. So naturally, I was curious to see what this was all about. Low and behold it was your typical MLM scam on Facebook called “Chat To Text”.

No. I am not linking out to this application as I am not writing this post to make myself millions of dollars and retire to some tropical island while being the ‘early adopter’ of this MLM scam on Facebook.

What I want to highlight is the fact that of all applications MLM scams should NOT be allowed on Facebook. There already are a multitide of worthless applications and invitations that I get every day to install this application and  that application. This is the biggest feedback that I get from those that I speak to about applications on Facebook, the fact that they hate all of the invitiations they are bombarded with on a daily basis.

When a clever and innovative way to create a sticky application comes along such as the Whopper Sacrifice campaign it gets shut down.

Facebook please do not allow MLM scams.

As we can see from the graph below toward the end of January 2009 Facebook will become the most popular social networking website on the internet.

I think this is primarily due to the fact that Facebook is grabbing all of the ‘MySpace graduates’.

Social Networking is all about the demographic and what that demographic does with the tools it has from a social networking standpoint.

I have seen this before from personal experience when I founded a small niche social ‘community’ back in 2003 it grow tremendously (for the niche) for a couple of years.  When MySpace came around it grabbed 80% of the audience from my small community website (currently over 30,000 members). Now Facebook has been growing because users of MySpace are ‘graduating’ from MySpace and moving on to the social networking community that the rest of their peers are utilizing.

Ask anyone who is in college if they use MySpace. More than likely their response will be that MySpace is for ‘kids’ or high schoolers.

Next Social Network Graduate?

My question is what or who will be the next social networking website that will draw in the graduates of ‘Facebook’?

As we can see from the visual to the left, social networking utilization is primarily for communication and conversation followed by multimedia activites such as music, video, and photos.

The lesser percentages is that of actual ‘contributors’ or ‘creators’ of content.

I wonder if social networking websites such as LinkedIn.com or even Tagged.com will become that next step for graduates of Facebook.com?

Or perhaps users will become so overwhelmed by marketers and advertising on Facebook that they decide to leverage the micro-blogging genre such as Twitter.com or Plurk.com?

My thought for a successful social networking website is one that will be a merger between P2P and a Microblog. Based on statistics known in visual. There is a need for such a service that will provide multimedia content without a user having to contribute or create the content themselves and at the same time be able to add their own photos and be given the opportunity to have conversations with those that they gauge as their most valuable ‘friends’.

Could a service like this pull the next graduate class from Facebook?

This means that Facebook will charge $375 per year for an application that is verified. If your application is verified you get the following:

Badging

• A verified badge graphic displayed on your application’s About Page indicating that it has been verified by Facebook.
• A special icon displayed next to your application in listings within the Application Directory.

Distribution

• Increased allocations for requests, notifications, and emails.
• Increased visibility for News Feed stories.

Advertising

• $100 of Facebook advertising credit.

Events

• Discounted registration fees to events like f8, Facebook’s Developer Conference.

In my opinion this an excellent example of platform type sites that have open APIs in order for other developers to build upon and if the applications are successful (Facebook applications are a great example) the platform is able to associate a fee for the applications to be ‘verified’.

This seals an application and its authority on the website and seperates it from many of the applications that are a dime a dozen.

For more detailed information on the process and policies to become verified please visit the Facebook Developer Verification area.