Facebook Destroys Lucrative Birthday Reminder Industry
Posted by Laura on November 17, 2008
Facebook just added another extremely useful feature for users, and in doing so took out a slew of applicaitions that do that same thing. You can now get a weekly email telling you, simply, which friends have birthdays coming up.
Lest you think this is just some random feature: Birthdays are big business. Bebo founders Michael and Xochi Birch started their social network Bebo with a simple birthday reminder service. That service had 100 million users at one point and still brings in $4 million per year in revenue from ecards and gift purchases. Bebo was funded in the early days from birthday reminder revenue.
It sucks to be one of the very many birthday reminder Facebook apps today. Such is life. With a flick of the keyboard Facebook can make your app redundant and pointless.
