Friendly for the iPad is the highest grossing social application and the 7th ranked top grossing app in the entire app store.  Amazing revenue for a program that simply restyles the touch version of Facebook (touch.facebook.com) that too few people know about.  Include me in that list, as, until today, I thought the touch version was still in development.  

Can you guess which of the two pictures below is touch.Facebook.com and which one is the iPad app?  Of course you can, since in one of the pictures you can see the browser.  But otherwise, they are the same, except that Friendly uglified things with overzealous rounding and shadows.  I do have to give Friendly credit for (very) recently adding Facebook chat support and a slideshow mode for viewing pictures.  Before this latest update though, you would be spending $5 for a questionable redesign of a very free website.  I must say it is a brilliant move, especially being that they have a limited window of time before the official Facebook app comes out.

I'm going to coin this as App Arbitrage.  Or should it be Web App Arbitrage?  I have the feeling that this has happened before and will happen again.  I hope this gets used as a case study in b-schools everywhere.

If you've been on the fence, just wait for the official app.  Go to http://touch.facebook.com in the mean time.  It loads faster than Friendly anyhow.