• CNET News.com, Friday, June 15, 2007 11:03 AM

Legions of dreamy-eyed entrepreneurs gathered at the Facebook Developer's Meetup, looking to develop the next big thing for the social network. The mood could best be summed up by the appearance of one entrepreneur who wrote, "I NEED an APP" on his nametag. Existing Web companies were also looking to develop Facebook apps, hoping to capitalize on the social network's 25 million-plus user base.

All this made talented Web developers a particularly hot commodity. "It's fantastic," said developer Nathan Freitas. Freitas is far from alone in his enthusiasm of Facebook's decision to completely open its social network to third-party application development. Still, the Facebook Platform is already reaching a saturation point less than a month after its debut.

More than 40,000 developers have requested to be part of the project so far, some 1,500 applications have been created, and some of the most popular ones are rapidly approaching 1 million users. "People are initially going to run into 'app fatigue,'" said Amit Gupta, developer and host of Wednesday's developer event. He and others warned that too many apps could overwhelm the site with clutter. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg countered that "decentralized systems...tend to be more efficient," meaning the Facebook application "market" would work itself out.

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