When Facebook announced fbFund, a new program to give grants to Facebook application developers, at TechCrunch40, they clearly hadn’t thought through all the logistics of the program. Applicants were urged to simply email in their ideas for funding - see the video here.
Now they’ve rethought that process.
I can imagine they’ve been inundated with applications, which may be part of it. But as Facebook finds itself increasingly in competition with its own application partners, they probably also fear the inevitable lawsuits from applicants who will say Facebook simply stole their ideas. To counter the threat, they have deleted all email applications and have set up a Facebook application to take information.
In an email to all applicants today, Facebook notified applicants of the deletions and set forth the new method of submitting applications:
Thank you for your inquiry about the fbFund grant program, and for your support of the Facebook Platform. Our goal for this program is to encourage as many developers as possible to write innovative and engaging new applications on top of Facebook Platform. Additionally, we hope to enable an even broader class of developers to become entrepreneurs by giving you the financial resources necessary to pursue a new venture that relies on Facebook Platform.
It has become clear that we will receive proposals which contain similar or even identical ideas. As a result, and in order to protect other developers and us from claims that we or anyone else copied material without the creator’s permission, unless we agree otherwise in writing, we can’t promise that any materials or information you submit here will be kept confidential, or specifically that we or others might not develop similar or identical products or services.
To make sure that everyone understands the conditions of submitting a grant application, we will not review any materials you have sent via email, and any materials you may have sent have been deleted. If you would like to submit an application for an fbFund grant or require more information, please see our website and grant application submission form at http://www.facebook.com/developers/fbfund.php. We apologize for the inconvenience, and hope the online information and submission form will help you develop and structure your proposal. We are accepting applications from around the world.
Again, we are very excited to be offering this program and wish you the best of luck whether or not you are an fbFund grant recipient. We can only give a limited number of grants and not getting one does not mean that we don’t believe in your application nor that it can’t be successful – it simply means that we have a limited amount of resources and weren’t able to give money during this cycle to you. You are welcome to apply as many times as you like as each funding cycle represents a new opportunity to receive a grant.
More information is available at http://www.facebook.com/developers/fbfund.php.
Thank you for your patience — we apologize for the delay in this response. We’ve seen a tremendous response to fbFund, and look forward to reviewing great proposals.
Cheers,
the fbFund team
Allen Stern has a post on September 20 showing the original email that applicants received when submitting an application. That email says “we can’t promise that any materials or information you submit here will be kept confidential, or specifically that we or others might not develop similar or identical products or services.” However, since this was sent in response to applications after they were already received, the legality of the clause was dubious at best. By rejecting applications and forcing applicants to agree to this statement prior to submitting an application, Facebook now stands on much firmer ground.
We’ve warned everyone before about the difficulty in building on the Facebook platform and quite possibly competing with Facebook itself. If you find yourself in that position, don’t look for legal remedies - you know what you got yourself into right from the start.
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As we say in the Force:
“Welcome to amateur hour”
Actually Mike - as I noted in my story several hours ago - the emails started going out this past weekend.
http://www.centernetworks.com/.....d-mulligan
The one forwarded to me was timestamped at 8 pm today. Since it isn’t 8 pm yet, I imagine that was received at 8 pm EST. I don’t have any further information.
Yea, I assume that any new inquiries to that mailbox will be immediately returned with the longer version because there will be clearly some continued flow into the emailbox. (the shorter version I posted 2 weeks ago).
Check out my story when you get a moment as well - thanks.
Not sure I follow the “warnings” about FB competing with you. If you are doing something that is at the core of Facebook’s business, don’t be surprised when they act to protect their interests. If you were Facebook you would do the exact same thing. Keep in mind that they want to keep developers happy at the end of the day and aren’t going to just rip off everyone’s good ideas.
As for this new process — this should make submissions more standardized and easier for Facebook to evaluate.
Give them some credit for being willing to clean up their submission process — I think it’ll give a lot of the new guys a good way to get into the game.
5th
http://www.rajuthan.com/
I was reading this article clearly. It does rip people’s hearts out. You know…
when you see this sentence — “we don’t believe in your application nor that it can’t be successful”. This mean there is no guarantee your application will be successful and you will get FBfund.
I think it’s good idea for Entrepreneurs not to sign up for FBfund. Why avoid sign up?
You don’t want Facebook damage your startup reputation. It’s waste of time. It’s waste of time…. They putting you a nonsense letters. So, I think you should listen other entrepreneur advice. Work hard & avoid competing corporate giants.
facebook just jumped the shark
I have seen this similar letter on web. I would never write plagiarism business letter. This is how is written.
First Paragraph… Thank you
Second paragraph…. We are unable accept this time…
Third Paragraph… We apologize for the inconvenience
Fourth Paragraph… We are exciting to offer … blah..blah…
Conclusion… Thank you for sign up…
I would never allow my startup to write that same format.
The best way to design facebook apps would seem to be to focus on niches rather than general usage features, which facebook might eventually incorporate.
Why would anyone work for free to make someone else more money?
Received: from SF2PMXB01.TheFacebook.com ([192.168.16.15]) by SF2PMXF01.TheFacebook.com with Microsoft SMTPSVC(6.0.3790.3959);
We got a reply from Facebook around Sept 20th about a faxed submission. We did not ask them for money but rather offered to sell them contracted developers as we do with enterprise customers.
Facebook did not email or fax our office rejecting our submission, so unless we get anything it would be safe to assume they are still considering it. We threw some users and IP in the deal, but won’t say what. I hope Facebook contacts us favorably this week if they accept our proposal, which, for the public reading here, does not include grant money for widgets. Our company works fair and square for the money we earn.
I was researching http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plagiarism
I like to know where FBfund writer get that letter from. Man, I would fired that writer. Seriously, I saw business letter. It’s so much alike. It was written 1960, 70, 88, 92, 21… Now and this.. It’s dishonest.
I think its good idea for facebook to rewrite the essay again.
It was a bad idea to begin with I think. They can hire more reputable companies like ours to do the work for less than the grants, and they can hire American, and Canadian firms with uni graduates.
Not kiddies. Professionalism means a lot, it means that they’ll get value for the money. Kids are going to code widgets that harvest data for their own profits. Companies like ours make a living protecting our customers.
Entrepreneurs…
Please do yourself favor. Don’t write Facebook app & business plan and submit facebook. It’s going to kill you. It’s going to waste your time. There is no 100% guarantee you get FBfunds.
If you are smart enough to do research… Did you know Mark actually stole ConnectU business plan, source code, and created Facebook?
What does facebook want from you?
An idea to steal…
Then FB will say that you have been warned:
“we can\’t promise that any materials or information you submit here will be kept confidential, or specifically that we or others might not develop similar or identical products or services.”
Why would anyone want to deal with these guys after this? What is the appeal to developing something for facebook? You’re merely giving them more of a reason to grow as a network.
why are so many comments in this post in broken english !?
“Thank you for your patience — we apologize for the delay in this response. We\’ve seen a tremendous response to fbFund, and look forward to reviewing great proposals.”
AKA–”We\’ve seen a tremendous response to fbFund, and look forward to stealing great proposals.”
seriously, please use proper English that other users can read/understand. And what is this ranting about plagiarism of a business letter? Are you kidding me? No one cares.
Chris R. — I hope you don’t expect FB to take your letter seriously…. they’re not going to hire some offshore company to make apps for them — that’s not the purpose here…. if you guys make such good apps, you’re welcome to release them and compete with everyone else. Do you understand how much power FB has right now? why on earth would they hire your company….
Seriously… If you don’t care about plagiarism. How do you feel if someone copy your idea so easy?
What are you going to do?
FB is the best, and Mark Z walks on water. Sure they steal from time to time, but who doesn’t. Now let me get back to completing my graph de social
So effectively, they own your ideas once submitted. Reminds me of when Yahoo acquired Geocities and changed the TOS to say that Yahoo/Geocities reserves the right to use your content however they like.
“they’re not going to hire some offshore company to make apps for them — that’s not the purpose here…. if you guys make such good apps, you’re welcome to release them and compete with everyone else. Do you understand how much power FB has right now? why on earth would they hire your company….”
A. We’re not offshore. We’re on the very same shore as Facebook and the rest of Silicon Valley.
B. We create applications according to specifications, and we do it well.
C. Grants are wasted money. If we are given a spec sheet and we fail to meet that spec sheet according to a legal agreement, we are liable. The lack of that liability means that a kid can receive 50k and go out and buy a BMW, then finish their facebook widget in 2 hours, and do a horrible job, giving them what is essentially worthless html and javascript, and they have no recourse.
D. Have a look at our rates. Do those look like offshore rates? I am from New York thanks.
E. We offered them considerable intellectual property and users in the deal. We’ll wait for for Facebook board, and ignore your speculation.
To all the ’steal your idea’ whiners out there …
You think if you don’t submit to fbFund, and then somehow launch your gizmo and get some attention that now it won’t be copied ???
If you are worried about being copied, you are in the wrong business at the wrong time, this is the era of quick copying sites and ideas, get used to it for a while.
“We create applications according to specifications, and we do it well.”
Your missing the point of an API bonehead. FB wants to encourage develop and see what happens, and yes probably copy some goodness and probably acquire some to.
XML RPC is irrelevant. Most major websites have it. Ideas are a dime a dozen. Implementation costs money. They can either brainstorm and pay for the BEST implementations that they came up with, where a company is liable for following through on doing it correctly, or they can gamble and throw money through the window, hoping people will do the right thing.
Chris, Coders are also a dime a dozen, especially if they cannot do anything themselves, without needing a full set of specifications first.
So, you are offering to do the coding for FB, but you stated that you need a full set of specs first - well, hell - if FB is going to spend the time writing the specs, why should they hire your company?
So you write good code - big deal, lots of people do that.
I’m not seeing your competitive advantage here - and making a bunch of noise in the TechCrunch comments area probably isn’t going to help you out either.
… Thank you for your application, we regret though that you are too stupid to waste our time on …..
http://fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com
Sorry… man. Writing FACEBOOK app is bunch of waste of time and hurting yourself. You won’t make dime either. Facebook is using you just gain popularity.
lol, seems like the same poster posting here with broken awful English — facebook is not here to “steal ideas” get over yourself.
chris — facebook can go hire people to code if they want them to go through spec sheets and get it done — they don’t need your company. what they need is a set of creative people who know how to get stuff done.
they’re not going to give these grants to no name “kids”
the people getting these grants will have had some or all of the following
a) entrepreneurial success in the past
b) elite university backgrounds (Stanford, Ivy Schools, MIT, Cal Poly, etc.)
c) solid business skills and technology skills
if you’re looking for a client to hire you to code, you’re wasting your time.
i would put you at 1000:1 to get any “deal” done with facebook and that’s being generous.