I’ve been doing some research for a project that I’m working on at the moment that will rely on Facebook’s new system that allows people develop their own ‘applications’. You may have seen some of these - usually involving throwing pigs at eachother, trying to bite oneanother in some kind of lycanthropic fantasy involving ninjas or in the form of little bits of “that’s too much information, dude” revelations… all of this being ‘virtual’ of course.
So, as a first attempt to learn the ropes in a situation that may be a little more forgiving than the actual release of a real live application for a real live client, I decided to attempt something simple.
A cool little application that will display all of the latest blog posts that Pete Ashton puts together for Created in Birmingham.
This is timely I think. I’ve noticed a strange phenomenon recently. I am having a conversation with someone and they randomly drop in some information about me that I am sure I have not told them directly.
It goes like this:
“So are you better now?”
“Huh? Oh - yes, thanks. You heard about that.” (Confused look)
“And Imogen’s nearly walking? That’s great!”
“Uh…. yeah….” (Looking blanker)
“And that RTS Award thing is great - when’s the ceremony? Tuesday isn’t it? Bet you’re really looking forward to that!”
“…. Uh…. yeah I am… Heh.” (Are you stalking me?)
…
“Okay great then - nice bumping into you.”
“Yeah - you too…” (Huh?!?!)
The power of Facebook - inverting the conversational flow by letting everyone know what you’re up to via Status updates!
It’s quite cool when you think about it, but it certainly started confusing me a little this week.
Aaanyway. I digress.
So I thought, seeing as everyone I know seems to be on Facebook now, yet most of those people don’t yet have RSS readers wouldn’t it just make sense to make a little something that you can put on your profile page that lists all the latest stuff that Pete’s been writing about.
So I made it. Go ahead add it yourself on the Created in Birmingham Facebook application page.
I must strees I didn’t ask Pete about this in advance - it just happened through a research process, so it’s very much a case of ‘here’s a thing I did - is it useful?’.
I’ve had a few interesting ideas around this. How about some way to click a ’share’ button so you can send interesting stuff from the site to other people? How about a handy ‘what’s on this week in Birmingham’ app? How about a box that lets you quickly add an event or a story for inclusion in a bunch feeds so that people can find out about what’s going on?
Facebook could prove pretty useful in getting people communicating and finding out about stuff in the city. I’d like to know if you find the app useful though - I’m sure there’s lots more to be done along these lines. A nod to Jon Bounds at UpYerBrum for giving me the idea…
10 Comments
Excellent idea …
Beats the 27 pending requests I have to turn me into a pirate.
I’m surprised more of the large-scale international bands and labels haven’t jumped onto this yet, listing their gigs, merchandise, releases etc in profile applications, huge potential.
Would certainly work well for a local events/gigs listing, photo streams etc - I guess anything that could warrant an RSS feed could work if people could be persuaded to install it.
A nice future addition might be the option to customise the number of stories showing, and whether just headlines or body text are visible.
Also interesting …
http://education.guardian.co.uk/link/story/0,,2202291,00.html
Interesting one - Im subbed to CIB via RSS (look at me with my abbreviations) but I might install this just to see how it works.
thanks for coming down on saturday btw - hope you enjoyed it.
Rich
Xx
Nice. Like the share buttons. I worry perhaps that it takes up a lot of profile space - could you add an option to customise the number of items show or extracts/full posts?
I think the FB apps that work best are the ones that create some activity between users - although almost that are there tho’ are quite trivial. (Apart from the quite cool iLike - unfortunately the best bits, telling you when bands are on tour etc don’t work in the UK).
I almost never look at my own profile, tho’ so having news stories pushed there for me doesn’t work well - the upyerbrum app fails too in that sense, but it’s really to promote the site to other people I guess.
There are built in mechanisms for sharing links/events etc of course, which would work quite well if people used them. A lot of people are using facebook in the same way they used myspace - profiles for events or venues for example - and haven’t really got to grips with the tools there.
What would be fantastic is a events calendar app that allowed you to see FB events added or ‘marked attending’ by either your contacts or people in your networks - and to subscribe to an RSS feed would be even better. This app may already exist of course - the other thing is that the FB apps search function is not very good.
Hey Stef.
Makes me think of a very messy post at 3form a year ago on various forms of ’status’ communication..
http://alt.3form.net/?p=85
Glad to hear things are going well for you.. I’ll try to catch up with you when I’m in Brum over December, or maybe I’ll just stalk your RSS
It’s a really interesting idea, if you were somehow able to hook up the CiB events listings to facebook events (or even some sort of special events created by the CiB application) then you could create a proper social events calendar. People who’ve added the application would then provide some free social advertising for what there going to and who with.
It would be handy as well, to have a “submit news” button which would go straight to pete’s inbox, so the application is read and write.
btw one added re-opening the application from the left menu brings up the “invite your friends screen again” instead of taking me straight to the feed.
It would be pretty good if you could grab the images from each post, scale them down and put them next to the text. Might need to hack wordpress up a bit for that.
Thanks everyone! These are all great ideas. Jon - interesting to hear about the ‘not reading your own profile page’ thing. I guess you’re right, I tend to go there just to change my status. Maybe some way of adding things to your main mini-feed on the main home page?
Also thought it might be nice to see what’s getting lots of comments on the site - so a list of things by recent comments perhaps.
On the submit news idea, I think what Pete wants is that there is a way that people can host their own content somewhere and then Pete links to it, but maybe we could set up some kind of Created in Birmingham Tumblr space that Facebook posts to? So it’s all user-generated, and then Pete can grab stuff at will - could make his life easier or harder depending on how you look at it…
Oh and I see we are already up to 33 users in one day! Not bad …. I was expecting about 10!
Whoops! Spoke too soon… that’s just doubled in two hours to 67…
A tumblr channel would be an ideal way - as soon as they were launched i set up a BiNS one - although as yet ‘channels’ on Tumblr don’t seem to produce and RSS feed.
Anyone can always tag their net stuff upyerbrum in the meantime
>How about a handy ‘what’s on this week in Birmingham’ app?
I’d love that. I haven’t yet found a really useful one accessible via RSS. Here for example is what Netvibes currently pulls in from Birmingham: Feel the Heat:
Santa Claus The Musical
Santa Claus The Musical
Santa Claus The Musical
Santa Claus The Musical
Santa Claus The Musical
Santa Claus The Musical
Santa Claus The Musical
Santa Claus The Musical
Santa Claus The Musical
Santa Claus The Musical
Santa Claus The Musical
Santa Claus The Musical
Santa Claus The Musical
Santa Claus The Musical
Santa Claus The Musical
Santa Claus The Musical
Santa Claus The Musical
Santa Claus The Musical
Santa Claus The Musical
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