facebook applications

When we build Facebook applications we always start with a spec.

A spec is a document that details the complete application user flow and provides the technical details necessary to put together a functional back end and stay with Facebook’s ever-morphing application terms of service. Basically it’s like a blueprint for your house.

We’ve talked with some clients who want to work from another Facebook application instead of first doing a spec.

I get the logic: “Here is a complete application that is already on Facebook. We know it conforms to the terms of service (or is not yet shut down) and we know how popular it already is. Why do I need to pay money to have someone write out the functionality when they can just look at it in action?”

Aside from the obvious possible pitfalls of simply cloning someone else’s application, ranging from possible copyright issues to opening yourself up to getting bashed the reviews, you’re only looking at half the picture when you’re using an application.

While the user flow is important to every application, it’s equally (if not more) important to have a complete framework for what the app requires technically. The plumbing, if you’ll allow me to continue the construction metaphor, needs to be planned out before you start nailing planks of wood together.

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Voter registration efforts typically rely on a great deal of labor and community outreach. Barack Obama’s massive spring and summer registration effort will likely rely primarily on card tables and paper forms.

But the University of Washington students behind the new Facebook application Your Revolution are working a different angle. By comparing a user’s friend list to their state’s voter registration rolls, this application seeks to determine who isn’t registered to vote. It then gives users the opportunity to send an invitation to their friends to register to vote online:

The app features a sophisticated and well-designed interface and encourages users to participate in a voter registration contest.

Unfortunately, this app only works in states that allow online voter registration. But as more states roll out online registration, I think you’ll see applications like this getting real pickup.

I’m still waiting for the day when we can use a social application to actually vote. Imagine ballots spreading like wildfire among people my age the way that viral videos do. Youth turnout would be through the roof.

The Wall Street Journal has announced a new Facebook application that allows users to share articles, It’s called “Seen This?”

According to ABC news it “will allow readers to see which Journal stories are popular among that user’s Facebook friends.”

I’ve been trying to find and install it, but it does not seem to be live yet(?)

We haven’t exactly been “tight-lipped” about this app while it was in development. If you showed up at our December Web Community Forum or ran into us at CES, chances are you heard something about InDesign Tips somewhere along the way.

What we’ve been whispering in the aisles is that we’ve put together an app that lets InDesign users submit and rate tips on how to use Adobe’s famous software efficiently. Oh yeah, and you can win prizes.

Well, in a similar, whispery fashion, we rolled it out earlier this month (bugs intact) for everyone to add and check out. To be honest, I was a little curious about how virally it would spread without any announcements whatsoever. So far so good.

But I can’t help feeling just a little bit bad letting the whole month of January roll on by without pointing out that we’re giving away some truly excellent prizes to the Top Tipster and the owner of the Top Tip.

For the Top Tipster - that means the person who has garnered the most points from all of their submitted tips, we’re giving away a free copy of InDesign CS3!

For the Top Tip - that means the single tip that has been voted up by the most people (and, theoretically, down by the least), we’re giving away a free pass to the InDesign Conference in Miami!

Interested? I would be. See how many points you can pull together by February 1st.

In the article Small Firms Tap Amazon’s Juice, Web-Services Unit Gains Popularity Renting Storage, Server Capacity, reporter Mylene Mangalindan profiles Renkoo Inc. Renkoo created a program called Booze Mail for Facebook, and uses Amazon’s online computer services to host it.

If you can’t predict the amount of traffic, then (Amazon’s) service is really awesome because it removes risk,” says Ms. Park. “You don’t have to invest in a lot of hardware you don’t have to use.” Renkoo pays Amazon about $1,000 a week for the service, she says.

I asked our developer to look into this a few months ago, and was told that the effort needed to get an app up and running on Amazon’s servers was more daunting than the writing of the application itself. I’d love to talk to someone who’s done it and get some additional insight.

Alexander J. Kates sure thinks so. His post detailing why the only successful applications on Facebook are utterly inane some of the fundamental tensions between platform owners and developers that Mitch Kapor talked about at Community Next.

It’s certainly worth some serious thought. Can anyone give me an example of a great Facebook application that has been absorbed by the entity as it were?

Our intrepid reporter Jason Preston got into application monetization with Rodney Rumford after Community Next on Saturday:

The big refrain I’m hearing down here in the Valley of the Silicon is that making money with Facebook applications is harder than it looks. As Adanomics’ Jesse Farmer pointed out, people rarely want to leave the Facebook environment. This would explain why Facebook’s click through rate is so utterly abysmal.

One way that applications are making money is through Peanut Labs. I interviewed Prosper Nwankpa and Murthi Hussein to find out more about their incredibly innovative monetization strategy, which is bringing in $25,000 a month for some developers.

Basically, Peanut is building a monetization platform on top of a series of applications which are built on top of the Facebook platform. I love it when things really start stacking up.

My top goal for this trip to the Bay Area for Community Next and Graphing Social was to learn what makes a great Facebook application. What a question to try to answer in a long weekend!

The remarkable thing about all the information flying around this conference is that a lot of it is contradictory. Mike Sego of (fluff)Friends started out with a simple idea. But he purposefully avoided many of the “viral” elements of Facebook. His application spread entirely because people wanted to virtually “pet” one another’s virtual pets — which they could only do by adding the application. To invite friends to use (fluff)Friends, you actually have to pay “munny,” the virtual currency on which the application runs.

By contrast Blake Commagere of Vampires, Werewolves and Zombies started out with an application that — much to my chagrin — does nothing BUT allow users to invite their friends by “biting” them.

Meanwhile, Craig Ulliott of Where I’ve Been is busy talking about vertical integration of the entire travel space on Facebook into one application.

So far, I’ve been able to glean three main commonalities amid all these diverse approaches to application development:

1. Start simple. Develop a core functionality with a clean, intuitive interface and launch it quickly.
2. Listen to your user base and respond quickly. Make your users the core drivers of your product development initiatives.
3. Build something that gives users a means of interaction. If the application doesn’t exploit the connections between users — a.k.a. the “social graph” — it’s a non-starter.

What do you guys think? Did I miss anything?

Mitch Kapor’s keynote at Community Next just ended, and he provided a trove of institutional knowledge regarding how to a developer should evaluate a platform before they invest time, effort, and dollars.

He provided a lot of overarching strategic insights, but near the end he delved into Facebook specifics. He admitted that he has not spent a lot of time looking into the APIs, but after some initial research said that there was “a roach motel aspect” to the platform that “concerns” him. Inherent to this is the notion that data can get in but comparatively little can get out. Kapor said that the first five things he wanted to do, Facebook didn’t allow him to get to the data to do it.