What is a Facebook App? You’ll get different answers based on who you ask, but surely the most common answer — from most agencies and their clients — will still be something like, “an application that sits inside Facebook.” I’d like to suggest that it’s all about the open web (which these days more or less means “the web outside Facebook.”)

A majority of people in the marketing industry still seem to believe that Facebook development is all about Canvas Apps (or Tab Apps). Even if those of us who work in agencies claim that we don’t really believe this, our business models give us the lie: how much revenue accrues to us from what we might call Tab build?

I’d like to pause for a moment to share a personal mantra:
Facebook marketing has everything to do with building Facebook into your business, and almost nothing to do with building your business inside Facebook.
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