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.

Check out the graphs here from Alexa!

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.

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.

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.

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.