Measuring Facebook applications with the data they provide is not all that useful. For a network valued on its customer data, there is not much terms of application data. They will tell you how many people interact with your application or use certain features of it (e.g. become fans), but are unable to (or won't) tell you what people do within, how many news feed stories they post, who these people are, etc.
This is a new space and I think Facebook can be a bit misleading at times about what it can provide. I'm not saying they are lying but because many marketing execs don't fully understand media analytics, when FB says they can provide stats, the execs think they can answer lots of questions. But, when the times comes that they get the business questions, they aren't left with any answers. Or at least any that have real business impact. Face it, Facebook apps have evolved way beyond visitors being an insightful metric.
In order to comprehensively measure FB apps third party vendors need to be involved. There are a few out there right now, one being Kontagent which is also able to provide viral metrics. But today, Omniture announced that they had released code to measure Facebook Applications. The major implication of that being, if you already use Omniture on your companies website, you can seamlessly connect FB app interaction to proceeding site actions and purchases.
This statement comes with about a million caveats, but I'm saying it anyway - it is getting easier to tell your clients how much $$$ social media can generate. Let's hope, at least for Facebook's sake, that dollars are indeed coming in.
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