• TechCrunch, Monday, January 5, 2009 11:30 AM

Apps are clearly here to stay, notes TechCrunch's Michael Arrington. The year-and-a-half-old Facebook Platform now supports tens of thousands of applications. MySpace, mostly through Google's OpenSocial, has made more than 4,500 apps available, and Apple's App Store, barely six months old, offers more than 10,000 programs for the iPhone.

However, Arrington claims there's a gaping hole in the app universe: None have a direct payment platform to let app developers collect micropayments from users. So far, the only ways for app makers to collect revenue on their products is to either charge one-time fees for downloads, or to sell advertising at low CPMs. Arrington believes that micropayments should become the third revenue stream, but he doesn't think that the likes of Facebook and MySpace will launch a direct payments platform directly. "There's just too many headaches to deal with," he says. "Fraud, chargebacks and security issues bring real costs and real liability. Duplicating PayPal's infrastructure just isn't cost effective."

A more likely scenario is for MySpace and Facebook to partner with a third party micropayments provider in the same way they both outsource classifieds to Oodle. Apple, however, will probably do it itself, through its iTunes payment platform.

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