As you read the breathless reviews of Facebook’s Q2 2014 results, remember that the entire App economy depends on a tiny group of whales who spend hundreds of dollars a month on in-App purchases. This is terrifying. Facebook’s stock price is the second derivative of in-app purchase revenue. Things are highly geared, and incredibly risky. Which isn’t to say that you can’t keep making money on $FB; just know the risks you’re running.

saila: Pretty obvious results in hindsight, but this is a useful map of app engagement on mobile devices

Robert Scoble had a great post yesterday about how location-based services will integrate to automatically provide you with help and useful information as you move around. He got a lot of it right, but my main concerns are with his beliefs that: users are smart and motivated enough to figure this out, and don’t mind sharing all of their location data, all the time, with everyone – this is consistent with Scoble’s belief in the end of privacy carriers will sit back and just let this happen; carriers have been screwing up location based services since the dawn of the mobile web – they could easily interfere and botch this, too, by pushing their own solutions and making it difficult for users to use alternatives device manufacturers and users will continue to let all of the logic move to the cloud; phones are incredibly powerful computers, and will get even more so – why not have my handset decide when to disclose my location, for whom and why?

Wow, what a few months. A wedding, a trip to Africa, and a tumultuous return to work that included a last-minute invitation to sit on a panel at the semantic web conference. Unrelated to all of this I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about location-specific mobile applications. Foursquare, Gowalla, MyTown, Yelp! and other apps have people checking in, buying places, and generating a lot of structured data tied to location and community.

foursquare launched their API yesterday (Mashable, Techcrunch). With it, developers can: identify what city the user is in read/write user and friends’ check-in data look up information for a particular location make/send friend requests retrieve venue data perform a local search that includes information from your friends’ check-ins add venues, tips, and to-dos This enables some pretty cool applications. For example, what about an AR app that shows me where all of my friends are?

I’ve been spending a lot of time looking at local, mobile applications and how they fit into gaming and local commerce. Michael Arrington biopsied the social gaming economy and found it to be quite ill. Marginal advertisers (and I use even that term loosely) are filling these companies’ coffers with cash from shady lead-gen deals. In other news Facebook announced an updated advertising policy which, amongst other things, will allow them to target users based on the geotags of content that they post.