Facebook Apps: waste of time? Nope, still good.

If there is such a thing as an internet tizzy, it’s happening right now all over Facebook’s pimply app-ridden face. When Facebook opened it’s doors to the world of what fundamentally amounts of widgets, people went crazy, developing thousands of addictive clicky-things to attach to user profiles.

Only a few of those, mostly the early ones, have had the massive all-get-out success that has everyone salivating. In fact, the drop-off is so precipitous that Valleywag and Fred Wilson have started wondering if this is anything to get excited about after all.

I think it still is. But most of the space left is for a different type of developer.

I don’t know enough (yet) about the rules of developing a Facebook App, but what we’ve seen so far tends to be either gimmicky (fun but reasonably meaningless), advertisey (hey! pay attention to me!) or, and these I think are the most successful ones, the apps that integrate something useful into your facebook profile.

Duh they’re the most successful…they are, for now, the most “useful” to the Facebook user. But just because users are picking up the thousands of “developed in a week” apps doesn’t mean there isn’t room to take advantage of an extremely rich platform.

I’m willing to bet that the next wave of successful apps will be for companies that aren’t trying to monetize them by getting gigantic amounts of traffic and users, they will be monetized by targeting the right audience and working to achieve a specific goal, the same way some blogs make money (Engadget) by having huge audiences, and other blogs (Dell) make money by getting consumers to like their product so they buy it.

If you’re Fandango, why not make a widget that lets people buy movie tickets from your service? There’s still value to be had by making Facebook Apps.