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The terms and conditions of Facebook's new f8 development platform may give its targeted developer audience pause before firing up the IDE and getting to work. The debut of Facebook Platform for application development received the kind of reception by tech observers that a World Series winner gets from its fans. Enthusiasm, euphoria, and lots of love surrounded its launch.

As Larry David might say, curb your enthusiasm. Vecosys blogger Ivan Pope took a peek at the terms and conditions associated with f8, and he found a couple of gotchas that developers have to consider.

He summarized the salient points in his post:

Be aware of this: 1. Facebook can limit you or terminate you at any time at their sole discretion (Section A.3) 2. Facebook reserve the right to impose fees at time and in any manner (Section 3) 3. Facebook can copy and distribute your Application, and analyse the content in order to target advertising (Section 4) 4. Facebook may create similar applications to yours, with no obligation to you (Sectition 4) 5. You can’t use any name or domain name address containing ‘facebook’, even at the third level, eg.g “facebook.xxx.com” (Section 6. C) 6. Be careful what ID you use for your developer account - IDs can’t be transferred or sold on, but nor do there seem to be corporate IDs. (Section 7) 7. Facebook can change the Terms and Conditions at any time, your only recourse if you don’t like this is to STOP USING THE SERVICE

The first four points are pretty critical, especially the part about reserving the right to impose fees. Anyone who builds a popular application on top of Facebook's platform could suddenly find Mark Zuckerberg in their inbox demanding a piece of the action.