Someone had to say it. As CEO of an application oriented company, I’m really disappointed so far with the Bebo Platform Launch. My bias is upfront: my company was left out of the launch in Sports, an area where we were one of the leaders on Facebook. According to a graph on Adonomics, our Fantasy Football application against the soccer applications from our rivals Fantasy Moguls and Pickspal (both of whom were included in the launch). Looks like we’re crushing one and keeping fairly close with the other.

Here’s the essence of the Bebo Platform as explained by Mark Hendrickson on Tech Crunch:

“While applications from about 40 launch partners will go live tonight on the “new” platform (with a total of 50 applications), the platform won’t be open to other developers until a couple of weeks or so from now.”

So… Bebo is launching an application Platform and waiting a couple of weeks to open it up to other developers. Why even bother releasing a platform? Why not just say, “hey these are the hand chosen special companies that will get to grow on our platform” ?

That’s what that launch feels like to me. The early companies are getting enromous advantages in growing their userbases and exploiting bugs in the current version of the Bebo platform. RockYou already has an application out with about 110,000 users and it hasn’t even been 48 hours since launch. In application platforms, it’s a huge uphill battle to catch up whether you’re even a couple days late on launch.

Here’s an easy example comparing 2 similar applications from the Facebook Platform:

228,091 daily active users on Free Gifts

2,531 daily active users on iGift

The difference? iGift launched a little under a week on Facebook and Free Gifts was able to grow like fire before iGift was able to get their application out. The results are clear: Free Gifts is a dominant application.Imagine being 2-3 weeks late on a launch all considering Bebo tied your hands behind your back and opened the golden doors to the hand picked companies. Now imagine that your company is doing just as well or better than the hand picked companies on other platforms. How would you feel?

Original post by Boris Silver