Sunday, August 19, 2007
Facebook presentation 1 at BarCamp
I was here at BarCampBlock all last night with a couple other guys. I was working on some ShareFlo stuff, one guy was working on the Zoo Facebook application that he wrote and I'm not sure what it was the other guy was working on. But it's been awesome to be surrounded by this much creativity. The people at this event are incredibly passionate about creating startups and building cool things.
I'm currently in a Facebook applications session with a recent Harvard graduate Jeff Gibb discussing some Facebook applications he's built. He built a simple little app last week where a person could pick a picture of an dinosaur and he sent the app to his brother. Since then, more than 500 people are now using the appliation.
But someone in the discussion just raised a good point that we need to know who is accessing our Facebook app. So what he has done is embed a Google Anlytics HTML so that he can get a sense of where the users are coming from. But getting engagement metrics on a Facebook app is difficult and is something that might need to be built by the application builder themselves.
One problem is the TOS for a Facebook app says that you can't run advertisements in your Facebook app. So how do you make money off of it? I think the only way it is beneficial to a company is if the Facebook app isn't pushing ads but is an advertisement itself. Sites like HotOrNot and other companies are using Facebook apps as traffic generating tools.
There is a great opportunity to use Facebook to give away almost a sample of your site.
The first version of the Facebook API was designed for a user to access their data from a third party site. There is always the question for a Facebook app developer is trying to figure out how much to give away.
Chris Messina is talking about how he enjoys using Twitter because it interacts with the outside world and when he was at Magnolia and allowed people to create a Magnolia account within the Facebook app. When the account was created, the data was being pumped out of Facebook. When they finally "grow up and move into the real world" they can go onto a new site or maybe move onto Magnolia.
Facebook has kind of like their own Javascript because of security issues. The reason you're limited in what you can use in Javascript is so that you don't mess with the rest of the page. Facebooks HTML formatting is actually called FTML. Even just creating a clock took a long time because you can't autoplay a flash easily.
Someone just brought up an interesting point that the security problems in Flash are bigger than the ones in Javascript but I can see why Javascript was locked down so much. MySpace was once taken down for a day or two because of a person that created a Javascript hack so the additional security is warranted. Later I'd like to see the sandbox environment improved.
The privacy discussion just came up that installing all these Facebook applications can be a major security issue. No one is sure if Facebook is thinking of privacy of a users data much when it comes to an application. Keeping all those check boxes checked can be a privacy issue for people.
If you're interested in more information about Facebook development, go to Meetup.com for the Facebook developers group. ¶ 10:23 AM
I'm currently in a Facebook applications session with a recent Harvard graduate Jeff Gibb discussing some Facebook applications he's built. He built a simple little app last week where a person could pick a picture of an dinosaur and he sent the app to his brother. Since then, more than 500 people are now using the appliation.
But someone in the discussion just raised a good point that we need to know who is accessing our Facebook app. So what he has done is embed a Google Anlytics HTML so that he can get a sense of where the users are coming from. But getting engagement metrics on a Facebook app is difficult and is something that might need to be built by the application builder themselves.
One problem is the TOS for a Facebook app says that you can't run advertisements in your Facebook app. So how do you make money off of it? I think the only way it is beneficial to a company is if the Facebook app isn't pushing ads but is an advertisement itself. Sites like HotOrNot and other companies are using Facebook apps as traffic generating tools.
There is a great opportunity to use Facebook to give away almost a sample of your site.
The first version of the Facebook API was designed for a user to access their data from a third party site. There is always the question for a Facebook app developer is trying to figure out how much to give away.
Chris Messina is talking about how he enjoys using Twitter because it interacts with the outside world and when he was at Magnolia and allowed people to create a Magnolia account within the Facebook app. When the account was created, the data was being pumped out of Facebook. When they finally "grow up and move into the real world" they can go onto a new site or maybe move onto Magnolia.
Facebook has kind of like their own Javascript because of security issues. The reason you're limited in what you can use in Javascript is so that you don't mess with the rest of the page. Facebooks HTML formatting is actually called FTML. Even just creating a clock took a long time because you can't autoplay a flash easily.
Someone just brought up an interesting point that the security problems in Flash are bigger than the ones in Javascript but I can see why Javascript was locked down so much. MySpace was once taken down for a day or two because of a person that created a Javascript hack so the additional security is warranted. Later I'd like to see the sandbox environment improved.
The privacy discussion just came up that installing all these Facebook applications can be a major security issue. No one is sure if Facebook is thinking of privacy of a users data much when it comes to an application. Keeping all those check boxes checked can be a privacy issue for people.
If you're interested in more information about Facebook development, go to Meetup.com for the Facebook developers group. ¶ 10:23 AM
