facebook applications: use or be used
I’ll admit, I was an early Canadian Facebook adopter — once they opened things up for non-students in September of 2006, of course. I had looked at Facebook long before that (the popular web application had been around for over two years prior to opening up to the general public), and unhappily had not signed up as I wasn’t a student at a participating institution. As soon as I could, I created my account, filled out all the required and optional profile fields, and waited for the friend adds to roll in.
Of course, they didn’t for quite some time; Facebook only started to proliferate amongst non-student Canadians in early 2007. During that boom time, I logged in several times a day, checked my inbox, pokes, posted witty status updates, and added new friends as they signed up. The mini-feed kicked in shortly after, causing a lot of people a little bit of grief, then settling in for the long haul. It wasn’t a big deal to have one’s virtual life broadcast to others, was it? Life was good. Facebook thrived.
Then in May of 2007, Facebook launched its F8 platform. At first, as a software developer, this seemed like a dream come true. The first few applications out of the gates generated massive interest; millions of users signed up for the likes of Zombies, iLike, Scrabulous, Free Gifts, and Super Wall. Was this adding anything to the Facebook experience? I don’t know. I was a major proponent of Facebook for a long time, but now things seem to be going downhill on the user experience end of things. I’m sure Facebook is doing fine in general, as they appear to be signing up over 2 million new users a week (as well as causing a few minor privacy concerns.) They’re well on their way to passing MySpace as the top social network on the internet within the course of a year. But where does that leave existing users?
Times change. A scant year and a half after creating my account, and less than a year after the initial boom of new users smacked into Facebook like a Mack truck, I barely look at the thing. I log in infrequently, usually only to manage event invites. If Facebook has done one thing right, it’s in the handling of events. Having all (or at least a good 90%) of your friends available in one spot makes organizing parties a helluva lot easier. So long, Evite.
But on to the topic of this post: Facebook applications.
Tonight, I had the displeasure of attending a Vancouver-based Facebook “developer garage” event. I say “attend”, but that’s not a fair statement; I sat there for a half hour as people schmoozed around me before the event actually started. I watched the first presentation. Then I bailed. I had no reason to be there. The guy sitting next to me making lip-smacking noises and scratching his beard for 40 minutes didn’t help, either. As it turns out, the whole thing was some kind of marketing event; local Vancouver-based Facebook app developers had turned out in droves to pimp their own products. Honestly, if you’re going to dub the event “Facebook developer garage”, you really ought to focus on developing Facebook applications, and not just become a marketing forum for people who’ve built half-assed apps that really serve no purpose other than to clutter up what had once been a relatively usable web application.
My beef? Facebook used to be slick. It worked well, it was effective and efficient at its given task. It used to fill a void in the online world — connecting people who know each other physically well enough, but may not be able to communicate as easily without this helpful tool. I used to login regularly, with a purpose.
Now? I login and half of my mini-feed is taken up by worthless drivel. My zombie was attacked by X’s vampire. X has joined my team on the Vancouver Canucks! Why is this relevant? Why am I being news feed spammed by applications where I haven’t even performed an action? I’ve pretty much uninstalled every third party Facebook application I had originally setup now, for good reason.
If you’re building a Facebook application, build it for the right reasons. Build it to leverage an immense community of 60+ million users who’ve provided insanely detailed demographic information. Build your application to drive traffic to an existing site. Build your application to spread the word about your site virally across a huge database of tech-savvy, young, marketing-agnostic users. People who don’t care if you’re just trying to promote yourself; they like your application, they like your site, and they’re more than willing to do the legwork of “sharing” (advertising, in Facebook-speak) the word to their friends as long as you provide them with something useful in the end.
Want to know what’s left after the purge of my third-party Facebook applications? Not a whole lot. I’ll list what’s survived and you can draw your own conclusions:
I probably would add Digg to that list had the application lasted more than a day on my profile. Of course, after it launched, it didn’t work for an extended period of time. I ended up giving up on it and haven’t even bothered to try adding it back in months. Facebook platform apps need to work out-of-the-box, otherwise there’s really no point in launching. You’ll end up alienating users who probably would have evangelized your app had they been given the opportunity.
The apps that have survived deserve credit, but in reality, the only reason they’ve survived is that with the exception of Dogbook, they all have offline counterparts that are the true locations of the specific communities in question. Last.fm and del.icio.us are both huge, thriving communities that really have no need of Facebook. They’re not parasitic, like many of the applications being built these days. They were well-established before Facebook became the Goliath that it is today, and they will survive even if their Facebook platform apps don’t. Xbox 360 does them one better: it’s a successful paying service and the applications people have developed to broadcast their Xbox 360 Live! status on Facebook are solely intended to draw more users to their service and more people to your Live! friends list.
Dogbook is unique in that it addresses something that Facebook really doesn’t handle well, pets. They also have mass appeal — they aren’t a tiny, niche market that could be utilizing the application concept better. In fact, Facebook’s canning of all pet user profiles last fall must have been a huge boon for Dogbook. I give them props not because their app is spectacularly good, but because they’ve taken advantage of a gap in Facebook’s armour and they’re exploiting it well. Well done.
It all comes down to the sandbox model. As Mathew Ingram pointed out in a post last week, Facebook has become a startup sandbox. Companies that aren’t sure whether they have solid site concepts or not are building smaller-scale Facebook applications to test out theories, and see whether their ideas are any good. Facebook is such a huge sampling of the population now, they can create an app within the boundaries of the site — with little-to-no overhead — and decide whether it’s worth pursuing on a larger scale, as a separate, stand-alone community.
But I’ll one-up Ingram on that point. Why would you restrict yourself to Facebook’s platform? The sandbox is not only in place to test out your theories, it’s also creating an invisible barrier to your concept. You’re limiting yourself to a very small overall percentage of the internet’s population. You’re preventing most pages of your site (aside from your application’s landing page) from being indexed by Google, Yahoo, MSN and other search engines and crawlers. You’re effectively sandboxing the appeal of your application to Facebook users, many of whom are disenchanted with the platform and its applications in general.
Why build an application entirely dependent on another site’s user base? Why limit yourself to that negligibly small portion of the web? Facebook makes a single API change, and your app is toast. Facebook takes a little dip in usage; your community may take a nosedive.
Maybe I’m a total cynic, but I’m in the middle of building a Facebook application for Protagonize, and I think I’ve gleaned a few useful facts from what’s going on around me. I’ll use Facebook to spread information about my site, and to let authors disseminate updates about their latest postings. I’ll use it to let authors post their top rated and favourite authors on their Facebook profiles. But I won’t build my community inside their sandbox. This evening was enlightening in informing me of what not to do. It also surprised me; there really are a lot of people out there who are either lacking in imagination or just don’t get the concept of how a Facebook application can actually build your brand instead of building Facebook up even more.
To summarize: iIf you’re going to build a Facebook applicaton, do it right. As I mentioned earlier, use Facebook to build out your site. Don’t let Facebook use you. You should be siphoning their user base, not the other way around. Let’s be honest here: they’re out to make a buck, and so are you. I’m sure there are some altruistic developers out there just trying to help out the general Facebook populace with their creations, but if I’m building a Facebook app, I’m aiming to draw traffic from Facebook, not bring them even more! Get people to use your app to draw traffic to your own site. Building a community within Facebook’s walls is noble, but you’re just hamstringing the effectiveness of your concept.
I’m curious to hear what others Facebook users think. Am I totally off-base here? Thoughts, criticism, hate mail — bring it on. Discussion is good. Sandboxing… is not.
As one of the local vancouver developers “pimping” out my app at the developer garage, I find your comments amusing. Although I don’t agree with your characterization of the developer garage, I do agree that facebook could have done a lot better job with the platform. After the Beacon fiasco, it basically went downhill.
But there is a number of groups in Vancouver that focus on the more technical side of facebook development, like this one for facebook and rails:
http://groups.google.com/group/rfacebook?hl=en