This week I’ve somehow seemed to strike a nerve with a few of my clients by talking Facebook Applications.
If you’re not familiar with Facebook, it’s a social networking site based around connecting with friends. Once you’ve singed up you can add various ‘applications’ that allow you to connect with and interact with other people in ways that vary from extremely useful to downright puerile. The great thing is that these applications can be programmed and added to the site by the users of the site (and companies who want to connect with those users).
I’m currently working on a viral project for Channel 4 with Maverick and as part of my testing I thought I’d teach myself the skills required to develop good Facebook applications so that we could launch part of it on that site.
So, what better place to start than Created in Birmingham. I figured that a little application that listed the latest stories to appear on the site on your Facebook profile page might be a nice way of keeping people up to date. And to be honest, developing something smaller for CIB is a much more forgiving environment in which to make a huge screw-up than when you have several thousand Channel 4 users!
So, I built the application, added it to my profile and invited a few friends, got some feedback, added some features, made some changes, and so on. What’s surprised me is that within a week there are over 350 people with the application added. Pretty good.
What’s even better is that it looks like people are actually *using* the application - not just adding it and forgetting it.
The graph at the top is the number of visits to the Created in Birmingham site that came from Facebook. Pretty self-explanatory!
So today, I launched a similar application for Paul Bradshaw’s Online Journalism blog, and we’ve seen similar rapid takeup of that application.
All of a sudden it seems that everyone wants a cool little Facebook application, and although it’s early days it does look as if there’s something in this simple Facebook application idea.
So I guess my new Facebook status will be “… is mostly making Facebook applications this month”.
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6 Comments
Forget Facebook, opensocial’s where you want your applications to be
We’re even thinking of doing an Archers app for Facebook!
I love your Created in Brum app. It could be a bit more concise though - maybe just headlines and a click to reveal more info rather than loadsa text that you dont wanna see/read.
Theres always some you do read & know more on, but I want it to fit in - not take over my overly anal facebook profile. Can you trim it just a little? Maybe 4 lines each for the main articles?
A graph with unlabelled vertical axis is hardly “self explanatory”; such things belong in tabloid newspapers.
@Andy - you’re right there. That was a screengrab of visits to Created in Birmingham where the referrer was Facebook. I screengrabbed it from Google Analytics as an illustration - looks like I cropped out the figure on the far left.
When Facebook Applications was launched I was excited about the possibilities and had to take a day out of revising for my finals to have a go at making one myself.
The excitement has now worn off as I’ve yet to see many applications that are actually useful and Facebook have got the tricky challenge of making sure that these applications don’t ruin the individual user experience.
In the past week or so I’ve noticed that stories are making it into my news feed about applications I don’t have. I don’t care if someone took a quiz and found out their personality is equivalent to a mojito cocktail and nor do I care if someone slayed someone else.
There’s also the fact that profiles are getting messy. It can take a couple of minutes to find someones ordinary wall amongst all their other walls.