Written by niraj on February 19, 2008 – 6:38 am
The number of Applications on Facebook has risen continuously since Facebook announced its Developer API in mid 2007. While there has been a slew of applications, it is very easy to see a clear trend. As much as 50% of the applications on Facebook are identity definition applications like Characteristics and Compare People, where people characterize their friends, and get characterized in various ways. A big share of the rest of the pie is taken by communication enabling applications like FunWall and SuperPoke which identified the limitations in Facebook early-on and made a field-day of the lower restrictions on spamming in the early days of the Facebook Developer Platform.
Is that all? Can a Facebook Application go beyond the fun to be had out of throwing cows at people, and try to do something that is useful, engaging and fun at the same time? Is there much sense in trying to do anything like that on Facebook? Why not an independent site? These are big questions. And questions any one launching a web-app today must answer. We have taken a close look at Facebook, and we think we have an answer.
We think it makes a lot of sense for a lot of web-apps to start out on Facebook, and here’s why:
1. An existing Social Graph: Any web-app that needs connections between its users to be established should consider being on Facebook. It makes a lot of sense to utilize the connections that people have already built on Facebook with their friends, family and strangers, than to try building it all over again from scratch in a stand-alone web-application.
2. Diverse user demographics: While almost all of the current most successful applications on Facebook have ridden on huge activity of teenagers on Facebook, there is a continuously rising base of users who are post their mid twenties, are college grads, and are not really interested in xMe and SuperPoke. A “useful, engaging and fun app” sure might appeal to them.
3. Freedom to Developers: Facebook allows developers to do pretty much anything inside their applications as long as they do not bother Facebook users who don’t want to use the application. This allows developers to do just about as much they could have done on an independent web-site, at a place the user frequents often.
The above three factors, combined together, offer a very exciting possibility for anyone launching a web-app today. Your web-app might be of the “serious” kind, and not as much “fun” or “viral” as a FunWall or Compare People, but it would still make a lot of sense to launch it on Facebook. What more, a “serious” application can potentially put the Social Graph to more interesting, beneficial and directly monetizable uses.
Of course, the opportunity comes with its own set of hazards. More later!
I think that facebook kind of places are good for fun applications but not really geared yet for serious collaborative applications.
For any kind of serious collaborative work (between say facebook friends), usually a good amount of confidentiality and security is desired. Would a facebook application be able to provide such capabilities?
A basic issue with a facebook/orkut kind of network is that the connections are of pretty generic nature. Everybody whom you have met in your past, could potentially be on your friends list and there is no framework to organize your connections based on different criteria (the way one does in ones mind).
A lot of people tend to keep their collaborations secret when they work together. Would it be possible to create secret guilds of ppl inside facebook ? I think not.
One could argue that web applications can be built which promote serious works of open nature (i.e. no confidentiality required). Even in such cases, a number of things are required: enabling organizational structure, conflict resolution mechanisms, information exchange frameworks for sophisticated information exchange (google docs comes to my mind)
Taking another angle: Why should we need to go to facebook website to use an application? Today we are moving towards Desktop/Internet integration (See ADOBE Air and Google Gears). Why cannot we have an application sitting at our desktop which allows us to interact with my face book friends (using the Facebook API through AJAX/SOAP/JSON whatever), and utilize the capabilities of a native desktop application to enable a more richer experience? As an example, is it possible that Open Office users could collaborate with their facebook friends over the documents they are working through the Open Office application itself? Without requiring to open up a browser and visit facebook.com ?
Just some ideas for thought.