Eat My Business

Rather than think of Facebook as “another social networking site” it is probably wise to think of it as an ‘operating system’ that offers digital access to the network of relationships that exist between the people on this planet.

As announced in Mark Zuckerberg recent speech about the Facebook Platform, this network of relationships (the social graph), is the key to the success of Facebook. Others are getting excited by the “Brand New Platform” concept too - I heard that TripAdvisor bought the “Where I’ve Been” application for $3 million.

I’m very excited about the whole concept of building Facebook applications because of the amount of opportunities that the platform presents.

So, as I sketch out my ideas, here are a few of the questions and resources that I unearth along the way:

Getting Started

• The Speech that gets you excited about the whole thing
• Facebook developers ‘Getting Started Page‘

What’s the point of the application / What ’social wealth’ does it offer?

As Facebook allows you to make money from your application, (via transactions and/or advertising), the rewards for hitting upon a killer app are obvious. But it won’t get very far if your application only benefits you.

One has to ask “What wealth does the application create amongst a community of friends?”. Wealth, in this sense means, “the stuff that people want” which is not necessarily “money”. The Facebook audience, that I know, mainly uses applications that provide the following examples of wealth:

• fun
• escapism (e.g nothing “work related”)
• silliness
• laughter
• props and tools for indirect social interaction (e.g poking, gifting)
• props and tools for peer-to-peer creative expression
• pimp-my-profile tools / profile improvements (e.g fun wall and those really functional tools that are so part-of-the-furniture that you almost forget they are apps)

Having written that list, above, I have done a search for “the most popular facebook apps” and found this page. It reminded me that I’d forgotten all those ‘girly things’ like horoscopes and tarot. So, I spose I should add those to the list and other things that spring from it:

• Girly things like horoscopes, numerology and tarot
• Self discovery - e.g the Political Compass
• Peer-to-Peer comparisons/discovery - e.g application Likeness, Where I’ve Been
• Community diary - forthcoming events / ‘how and when we first met’

I guess if you are stuck for ideas - the best thing to do is to see which ‘applications for social interaction’ have stood the test of time. e.g Parlour Games, Drinking Games, rainy day activities, card games and word games etc.

Choosing a name for your application

If I’m going to build Facebook’s next big application. I want to be sure that I have a complimentary domain name to match. After a some hasty domain name searches on Easily, I suddenly realised that there may be a few rules about naming my application that I may have to adhere to. There is some info about this on their faq page. (under Other > What application names or domain names can I safely use for applications built on the Facebook Platform?)

Maximum character length for a Facebook application name? I’m not sure yet but it should fit neatly onto the ‘applications menu’ on the profile page.

2 B Continued…

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 30th, 2007 at 8:32 pm and is filed under building Facebook applications. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.