More thoughts on monetizing Open Social

Chris Schalk, a developer advocate at Google who's working with designers and coders who want to build Open Social applications, tells us in this interview that the business model for this market is still in its early phase.

"People are still experimenting," Schalk told me.

Read more ideas here on where the Open Social ad money might come from. 

He showed me an approach being used by MTV on one of their own sites, which has a small widget ad in the form of an MTV brand logo that gets dropped in with its PhotoBuzz application. 

As we spoke, the head of a small gadget company came by and offered his opinion as well.

Because all the major social networks forbid developers from placing ads directly on their user's profile pages, the challenge is to entice social network users to get to the full page dedicated to the application, said Jerome Mouton, owner and lead developer of LjmSite, which makes travel-related gadgets.

"You have to find a creative way to get the user to the canvas," Mouton says.

His company has been placing their apps on iGoogle and generating an "OK revenue stream," Mouton says.

He hopes that big sites like Facebook, MySpace and Hi5 will eventually allow small, relevant sponsored links on more pages. "They'd have to be small enough so they don't turn the user off," he says.

Mouton says that even with the standardization brought by Open Social, his company still has to do custom work to make their apps work with different sites.