Facebook Applications

September 16, 2007 on 11:19 pm | In Facebook apps, General, Web apps |

The Facebook platform has been released for a while now, and believe you me, I’ve been doing development on it since day 1 of that until now, non-stop. I think I can say with fairly good confidence that I’m an expert Facebook developer in PHP.

Facebook applications originally provided something with very good potential, but unfortunately, it isn’t really working in the way I would hope it should.

Usefulness vs triviality

It is extremely unfortunate that majority of the Facebook applications that “succeeded” (currently) are entirely useless ones such as SuperPoke, X Me, SuperWall, and Top Friends. It is not hard to see how they succeeded.

Slide and RockYou apparently has some sort of partnership with Facebook (correct me if I’m wrong in this); they were able to push out some applications since day 1 of releasing the Facebook apps platform. They created these useless little apps, and made ways of spreading them (mainly the “Invite your friends” page when you first add the app).

Of course, now that everybody knows what that is, everybody just skips that page entirely. But when it first started, people actually invite other people through that.

Normally, an app getting popular, no matter what ways it used to accomplish that, isn’t really a problem. The main problem here lies in the fact that these apps are mostly useless trivial apps — look at SuperPoke, X Me, Free Gifts — they do nothing more than posting a message or an image on a friend’s profile. Top Friends has a little more to it than that, but also doesn’t have much practical uses other than generating hate from your other friends who didn’t get in your Top Friends list. (did anyone actually think of that when they add people to their top friends? I can’t believe how many people actually think Top Friends is cool. It destroys a lot more friendship than improving any.)

All of this gave a really bad example for new developers starting at this stuff. Other programmers see the success of these useless little apps, and they go ahead and make some too. It easily became the norm, then, to make trivial apps on Facebook. This in turn leads regular Facebook users to get used to the fact that Facebook apps aren’t to be taken seriously. It’s just fancy little toys to be added to your profile with no practical uses. Now, the only difference between Facebook Apps and the trash you see on MySpace is that Facebook Apps are more secure and more difficult to program for — other than that, there is no practical difference.

This is really, really sad because Facebook apps would have so much potential otherwise. Facebook could’ve pulled the a great part of web 2.0 applications into their platform if Slide and RockYou didn’t set such bad examples! The possibilities would’ve been endless.

Before Facebook Apps

Did you know that a Facebook development platform existed before Facebook released Facebook applications? You could develop third-party web applications (or even desktop applications!) using Facebook’s social network data to back you up. They would be standalone web sites, only having a Facebook login. All “Facebook Apps” did was to allow you to integrate your application into people’s profile boxes and provide you with a canvas page (which is mostly just an individual web site, for the most part).

Take a look at this: MoochSpot. It lets you “keep track of debts and shared expenses with your friends”. Excellent idea, nicely done using the Facebook platform.

And you know what? That is what Facebook applications should have been like in the first place! Useful web 2.0 web apps integrated into Facebook. NOT trivial little toys to add to the Facebook profile.

Another way to see it

Perhaps, though, Facebook could help us partly solve this problem by fixing their Applications directory. Help those of us developers who actually invest development time into creating a serious application with practical uses, and help the users find out about these things.

Categorize Facebook Apps into two big categories — little toys and serious apps. Or better yet, just call little toys something different altogether, like “profile add-ons” or something. That is where stuff like SuperPoke, Top Friends belong. Facebook Apps should be where stuff like MoochSpot and GoInGifts belong. (That second one, by the way, is what my team has been developing in the past month. The Facebook app, not the standalone web site — that is just a temporary placeholder designed by some web designer.)

Conclusion

Of course, Facebook Apps are still young to really say anything about it significant at all. There could very well be major changes coming up within the year that makes it into something entirely different, maybe working like what I mentioned above. Even the Facebook platform itself isn’t in a stable state yet — changes are being made from their engineering team every week, stuff is getting added, removed, and updated all the time. Let’s hope for the best and hope that Facebook will eventually solve all this out, and not to make it like another MySpace.