Another Texas VC

I spent last night at the Facebook Developer Garage event in Chicago, learning about more Facebook apps than I will ever be able to mention in this blog. Developing Facebook apps seems like a great first step for an entrepreneur in college, but outside of some notable freemium exceptions, I haven’t really seen a compelling monetization path for these applications.Last night’s event was primarily focused on launching Facebook Connect. Although Luke from Facebook stressed that partners with Facebook connect are really deploying very complicated Facebook Apps, I see a more distinct difference. By allowing you to utilize Facebook’s credentials and feeds for your own website, Facebook Connect opens the door for Facebook partner sites to actually make money.Part of what’s compelling is that Facebook Connect lets you use Facebook as a lead generation service to your own website by giving you access to your customer’s Facebook feeds and email addresses (through a re-direct). The next obvious step would be for Facebook to develop a full wall-to-wall transaction processing service like Google Checkout, eBay’s Paypal, or Microsoft Paypal. You use Facebook as your electronic wallet and enable one click transactions across any partner website.

Next thing you know, maybe even Facebook will start making money off of the transaction fees J