Treading the Social Landscape

TechCrunch reports on one of Facebook’s initiatives internally titled Project Beacon.  Read through the comments and you’ll find some paranoid folks concerned about privacy.  I’m not sure I’d be so concerned.  In this day of social networking and while we value our privacy, we must admit that a part of us desires to broadcast our activities.  We must further admit that we go to Facebook partly to know what others are doing.  Is it not fair to emanate our own activities as a small token to iew activities of others?  Call it a “walled garden” but the only people that would know what you purchased would be those who are your friends anyway!

Not to mention that Facebook would make it explicitly opt-in and allow you to actively decide whether or not you want your purchase activities viewable to others. 

Of course this is only have of what Project Beacon is about; the other half is to present more targeted advertising to you both on and off Facebook.  Again, let’s face it.  If we’re going to be presented ads, it would be fantastic if they were relevant at the very least.  Considering the ad click-through rates have been poor inside Facebook (people who are “inside” Facebook want to stay inside), there’s stuff happening there that could be quite helpful in the choices of ad networks in what would make a better creative display of ad space depending on who you are - or who you are likely to be.

There is some value in having structure to social networks.  While the buzz is about the Google-spearheaded OpenSocial initiative (which we are experimenting with in-house as well), Facebook is skyrocketing in terms of traffic and will be passing MySpace shortly!

Check out the graphs here from Alexa!

Facebook stays bleeding edge in almost all respects.  They recently announced the new Facebook Platform for Mobile and it is awesome!

I have a Blackberry 8800.  While Facebook already had a website that worked fairly well within the native Web browser application on the Blackberry, they leapfrogged their own efforts with the launch of their native Facebook for Blackberry application.  Naturally, I installed it and I was impressed with how the tied the application with their previous efforts in the construction of the mobile version of their website.  You can poke, message, accept friend requests all within the application - and where the native application falls short, you’re redirected to the appropriate page through the Web Browser application.

So what does this mean for application development?  A lot!  Dustin Moskovitz, a co-founder of Facebook, mentions the importance of mobility in this era of technology (more about this here) and Facebook followed through with this by releasing documentation outlining their Mobile Platform and what it means for developers.   For the official announcement that summarizes Facebook’s strategy, see Dave Morin’s post here.

My team has even more to play with now!  If your company wants to leverage the Mobile platform and you have some ideas, contact us at info [at] apps4facebook [dot] com.

Every once in a while, I come across something I think is just too good to not worth jumping back on this blog and giving two thumbs up.  In this case, it’s Gliffy.com which is a lightweight diagramming tool like Visio.  Following the 80/20 rule to the max, you get the 20% of features in Visio in Gliffy that you would have probably used 80% of the time.

In the age of Software-as-a-Service, I felt absolutely comfortable cracking open my wallet and putting down $20 for 1 year of diagramming goodness with this web application.  If you’re looking for a quick and painless way of creating wireframes and can’t stand bloatware (read: the stuff you install on your PC that takes 10 seconds to load and eats up 100MB of memory), try Gliffy and you won’t be disappointed.

One of the most frustrating things for application developers building apps on the Facebook platform has to do with the surprising problems that show up regularly from the updates that Facebook pushes out on Tuesdays/Wednesday every week.

Here’s the problem: If Facebook has a bug or if there is something “broken” in the platform that affects a user’s experience of your app,  the user will blame you - not Facebook. 

One of our clients discovered one day that “mock-ajax” (a simple implementation of ajax that works in the Facebook canvas) was broken.   She asked if we could attempt to use FBJS Ajax as an alternative - considering that mock-ajax seemed to break regularly and that her business could not depend on the instability surrounding this feature.  We were able to suit her needs but it really brought to light the significance of this problem - that you can only be as good as your platform allows you to be.

What is Apps4Facebook?

Apps4Facebook provides Facebook Application Development services.  We’ve developed several dozens of applications that tap into various domains of the “social graph” and are closely aligned with other companies built on the Facebook platform.

It is a common fallacy that companies and individuals believe that building a Facebook application is no different than building a normal web application.  Many companies have tried their hand at building applications that was essentially an implementation of their standalone web application only to see that the application wasn’t being used!

Apps4Facebook believes in the value of “tapping into the social graph” to make Facebook applications that are rich and engaging by thinking out of the box and from left field.  If that wasn’t a sales pitch, I don’t know what is.

For more information, visit our website at http://www.apps4facebook.com.

I’m excited to announce the launch of the Apps4Facebook (A4F) Blog!   We’re excited about our position in the Facebook community as an exclusive Facebook development group and are looking forward to sharing our position/thoughts on the Facebook platform, the development of great Facebook applications, and all other things related to social-networking.

A little bit about me (your host): I’m Roj Niyogi and I direct our development group.  You can reach me at niyogi [at] apps4facebook [dot] com if you have any questions and I’ll do my best to answer.