With the release of its new platform, Facebook, aos recent efforts in social media provides a unique opportunity for marketers, developers and companies to tap into the social network, aos young, active, and viral crowd.

However, the past few weeks there is a growing concern among developers to find ways to monetize their Facebook applications to discover. The curse of instant success online is that you can no longer maintain expensive servers to support hundreds and thousands (or millions) of Facebook users. The question: how can the developers of Facebook apps actually make money? We Aot Thurs, yet all the answers, but here are five suggestions:

1. SELL. Develop applications only for the purpose of selling them to interested parties. Several applications have already been acquired in this way, the most recent example is that of Moses, including the purchase of TextMe.

2. DEVELOP. An indirect source of funds: the development of applications for third parties. A number of companies are posting jobs on contract to take on the Facebook, aos developer forums.There is a large gap in supply and demand of available Facebook application developers, as a result, finding potential customers for a reasonable rates may not be a hassle.

3. ADVERTISING. Use advertisements, cross promotions and affiliate marketing. It is not feasible to use Google Adsense for this, because Facebook does not allow JavaScript embedding.Adsense can be embedded through iFrames, which although popular with Facebook developers, it is against Google TOS aos.Affiliate marketing is a great alternative to advertising, my source of income on Facebook is generated through Amazon, aos affiliate marketing.

4. Micro Payments. Selling services within Facebook using micro-payments. PayPal payments for access to premium services income could reasonably possible returns depending on the application, aos purpose, scope, and future users.

5. GET INVESTMENT. If you think something big on your hands and lack the means to this scale, are for investment through Bay Partners and others that have shown interest to fund Facebook apps. This would be the likely course of action for a startup with plans to expand globally within and outside Facebook.

Facebook has a huge active community. It is reported that the 29 million active users, about half to log every day. This is a rarity among Web 2.0 companies (relative, Google Video has about 3% active users). If Facebook can convince its users to shell out $ 1 for that silly virtual Äúgift send AU images to each other, it is certainly a smart developer or starting to find other approaches to earning money from a Facebook application where no drowning in advertisements to their users.

Due to the pace of innovation over the web, it is imperative that companies such as jumping on opportunities as they emerge.Bebo and LinkedIn are expected to have their own set of APIs for developers release and I personally can not wait to be among the first to tap into that possibility. I advise others to start planning too.