Facebook application creations at BarCamp session
These are my quick notes of everything we talked about during the presentation.

For the most part it seems to be a shotgun style approach to the application development. Much of the discussion is with the creator of the Facebook app Zoo.

There was a question about the business sense of Facebook apps but what if this is like the web circa 1995. It's good to be there to shape what it becomes in the future and there will be business utility but we don't understand what it is yet but it will be come apparent in the future. When it does become apparent to everyone, the Facebook app creators will be well positioned.

One of the audience has been using Facebook like a Sharepoint site so that the 17 people at his company can communicate and share documents.

Graffiti is interesting because it's become a popular Facebook app but is similar to a child's game. It's a basic concept that people enjoy. I think part of it is that people want to modify or add their own unique mark on another person's profile.

One of the people here has a company that is working on about 20 applications, some of them are throw away apps but then some of them are more about productivity applications so that people can collaborate together. He hasn't launched any yet.

One interesting note, apparently Facebook time is 100X internet time. I don't know what that means though.

For a lot of the Facebook development, we want to figure out if the massive amount of early development that we saw at the beginning when the application development tools came out is going to stick. A lot of the people doing it are just trying to learn something and they aren't so concerned at this point about making money. The money will come at some point. You know, step 1: steal socks, step 3: profit. I believe traffic will be moved to other sites through the applications instead of the applications being businesses themselves.

There was one question about possible collaboration between working together on applications or maybe making the applications collaborate together. There is more value in using a set of apps.

There is an IRC channel where a lot of the Facebook users hang out that would be a good way to promote or get help on development.

irc.freenode.nut #facebook

There is also a meetup group in Silicon Valley that also does hack-a-thons every few weeks. There is a Facebook group for the Facebook groups.

Some of the Facebook applications have been open sourced but it's not too big because initially Facebook application developers were getting bought out after only a week of work. So many of the developers thought that maybe they should try to get bought out as well.

How are people finding applications? It seems some people are finding them through news feeds but also some people want to do something specific so they search for the applications. I've found all my apps by my friend's news feeds.

What are the downsides of Facebook applications? The types of information appearing in a news feed is becoming somewhat spammy. Things like someone biting another person as a zombie with an app isn't really going to help others keep track of what is going on in those people's real lives. The news feed only contains so much and a bunch of Facebook only actions are going to clutter the feed.

There was a big discussion lately online on this topic that iLike and many of the popular applications use the spammy tactics for posting to the Facebook news feed. Facebook will kick the application if it spams the news feed without user interaction but even with user interaction, it's still can be annoying to see.

The Facebook photos application was really successful because you could tag your friends in photos. Even though only 1/3rd of people in the Facebook community had added photos, most of the Facebook community had been tagged in a photo.

How do you choose which language to use? PHP is what Facebook supports first and is also what Facebook was written in. Everything should work best in PHP.
What is the ecommerce model for applications? Some of the apps are having people fill out surveys and as a reward they give the user digital rewards on Facebook.

Another thing is affiliate links from Amazon and another that works with iTunes.

How do you design a succesful API and why is it so awesome for Facebook? Facebook hasn't given out any contact information through their API. So it hasn't given out any email addresses or screen names which is good for privacy. But they're giving out all of the other information such as the networks the user is a part of.

What categories of apps are people doing in the room? Comparing photos, business productivity, dating, web presence, a sorting tool by looking at a friends list for scheduling events, professional networking.

Are people working on business productivity and professional networking applications?

Why are we developing for Facebook? Facebook is one of the only sites large enough with an API good enough so that we can actually develop awesome customized features for.

Many of the questions at the forums for developers at Facebook have better answers often.

Best suggestion? Hang out with people that do Facebook apps. Get in the wiki and the IRC.

How many people actually use Facebook to track their friends in this room? Maybe 25% of people raised their hands.

Business productivity apps? The definition of friend on Facebook is very loose so it's hard to categorize friends as coworkers as well. As a result, there are some applications potentials there but people aren't going to Facebook yet to do work.

Companies like Google with Google Docs are probably much better positioned to build the productivity apps than a 1 man team. One guy spent weeks building a complex documents app and it didn't take off. So now he's building a simple photo rating app or something similar.  ¶ 11:11 AM