One of my favourite products from this year’s Demo show was Zuora’s Z-Commerce for Facebook. With Facebook having failed to give application developers a way to sell their apps to users a la the iPhone’s app store, most of the developers have had to resort to free, frivolous apps that they then look to monetise through ads. This for the most part hasn’t worked. Enter Zuora’s Z-Commerce which apparently enables developers to plug-in tools for charging users for the use of their apps.

The Zuora Demo finished with the presenters asking the audience to think of a Facebook app that they would pay for. One might be forgiven for thinking that because Facebook users are already accustomed to free apps, they would be unlikely to want to pay for any apps. This may well be true but here is an idea for an app that I would seriously consider paying for if it were technically feasible and implemented.

The app I am thinking of would serve as an automatic birthday greeting messenger. In other words an app that would allow me to schedule birthday greetings and/or gifts to be sent to each of my Facebook friends as and when their birthdays come up. I don’t want to receive reminders about people’s birthdays so that I can manually send them greetings – I want the app to just send them.

Now I think the reason that such an app does not appear to exist currently (I dida cursory check) is that it gives users very little reason to revisit the app, which means the app would score low on Facebook’s scale of app popularity – number of monthly active users and more importantly, means that the app will make very little revenue if any from advertising. As a paid app however, a developer might care less about the number of monthly active users. Besides, you could always prompt members to come back to schedule greetings for newly added friends.

I do see one potential issue for such an app though – it might struggle to achieve viral growth because as a user of the app, I wouldn’t want recipients of my greetings to know that the greetings were auto-sent. This means that the whole value proposition of the app – hassle-free greetings – cannot be explicitly expressed in the Facebook News Feed and other viral channels. Still, I would gladly pay something like $4.99 a year for an app like this and perhaps pay upfront for 3 years.