When attending the Facebook Hack in Berlin last week I had an idea. After all these weeks I looked into Facebook app development I realised that a consequent step for Facebook would be to offer a single purpose cloud hosting solution.

Think about it. Facebook by now must have a gigantic server infrastructure and by now they must’ve acquired a lot of know how in terms of scalability just like i.e. Amazon did before.

So technically Facebook should not be far away from offering such a service. But why should they do it?

Well, one of the reasons why Facebook is so successful is that there are tons of apps that are a benefit for the user of just plain fun. Apps produce buzz and traffic on Facebook and keeps users interested and entertained.

Apps though need to be hosted somewhere.

Now if you could create an app by simply signing up for a cloud space you could even get some HTML5 + PHP|Python|Ruby|.. boilerplate code that allows for a quick start.

This would save a lot of Graph API latency and as iframes would probably become obsolete too you app would even be indexed properly by search engines. Also authentication would become a bliss.

It might even be possible for Facebook to provide automatic API updates?

Of course there would have to be a price for all that but I would expect a series of pricing schemes ranging from small apps for free to bigger ads driven apps that would cost some money. But then all prices would probably be cheap in comparision with other services as the main benefit for Facebook would not be selling but encouraging more apps to be build.

Now if nobody at Facebook thought about this I am puzzled. In fact I expect this to happen within the next 24 months.

Oh, and in case you’re hiring…

Cloud Hosting · Facebook

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