Facebook Applications in the Daily Evergreen
The Daily Evergreen has yet to update their website with my article that was published in the Thursday paper. I really want to share it with you guys but I don’t have a link to point you to. In the meantime I’ll just provide the article under a cut and provide a link to the .pdf file of the article on their website. I’m warning you now that it will be a PDF file. I know that I hate it when I open PDF files and my entire computer comes to an painful halt.
The topic I explored in this article are FACEBOOK APPLICATIONS.
by: Nicole Hensley
The popular social networking site, Facebook, has opened its doors for Web developers to use their craft to create new applications for their Web site.
Facebook applications have been designed for the integration and centralization of social community sites, such as iLike, Last.fm and Twitter. On the day of the debut, Katie Geminder, Facebook’s director of product, wrote on Facebook’s blog: “With this evolution of Facebook Platform, we’ve made it so that any developer can build the same applications that we can.”
Geminder also describes applications as being: “Things like Photos, Notes, Groups and Events. They live in the left hand menu and they use different parts of the core, which tend to live in the top menu—things like Facebook profiles and News Feed. But most importantly, applications use the real connections people have to help them share information more efficiently.” They are features that accomplish what the programmer set out for them to accomplish. Be it for the purpose of rating movies or extending your profile information.
It took a while for some Web sites to get their applications out there. Some were given a six week head start for the May 24 debut, while some Web sites found out about Facebook’s new development the same time their users did. To make up for the lag behind official applications, many Web developers created their own unofficial applications for their favorite Web site.
This is a bold move for Facebook. Opening their source code to the public allows for a greater amount of user generated content to be created. Anyone with knowledge in web design has the ability to use the tools provided by Facebook to create and share their own applications. The Web site no longer has to rely on their own staff to create every application.
Examples of these unofficial applications are the social bookmarking site Del.icio.us, music charts site Last.fm and the photo sharing site, Flickr. Each application was created by two different high school students. Jake Jarvis, from New Jersey, created the first Last.fm application, which gave the majority of users a substitute before the official application debuted.
Meanwhile, Steven Bao, from Boston, created both the Del.icio.us and Flickr applications. No official application has been created for either of the sites.
“The Facebook applications face a couple issues that make them a little different than the normal Web application, ” said Scott Robinson, a senior computer science major. “They have a rather complex authorization dance they still have to perform with the Facebook servers to work properly. Facebook claims their third-parties have access to all the features and capabilities they do in their applications, but they’re still second-class citizens.”
Jared Chastain, a senior history and political science major, added the Movies application created by the movie rating Web site, Flixster. Its purpose is to share with friends your rating on the movies you have seen.
“I got used to the mini-feed quickly,” Chastain said. “But, frankly I think it’s boring to read what movies people really like and really don’t like. Those are the only movies people seem to be motivated to rate. I don’t care what Ebert thinks about movies, why should it be any different for my Facebook friends?”
The Flixster application has gained more than 900,000 users since it start up on Facebook.
Another purpose of most Facebook applications is to share other Web services that the user might be a part of, but not all Facebook users are happy with the change.
“[Applications] allow people to make their profiles ugly like on MySpace,” said Robinson.
These applications allow more insight to the likes and dislikes of one’s friends. Facebook was originally designed as a method of sharing and exploring a user’s interests. However, the site is still seen to some only as a means of communication.
“I use Facebook to keep in touch, not research my friends’ personalities,” said Chastain.
Over the course of Facebook’s history, they have continuously integrated different features into their Web site to feed the evolution of the changing design of social community sites throughout the Internet. However, it is still a growing medium.
“We’re on a trajectory to be pretty universal soon if we can keep our growth going” Mark Zuckerberg said in a recent interview with CNN.
This new feature has sparked numerous complaints. Comments on the application review pages note that the newer the application, the more bugs there are crawling through it, inhibiting its ability to work properly.
Facebook plans to continue their development, not as a media company, but as a business and a technology company.
Page 3 of the PDF, Page 4 of the PDF
If only I could get paid by the word. I would have made bank on that article. The photo used was taken by me actually! I got paid for that as well. I very proud of this article. I’m happy it worked out. A very interesting thing about AP style is that “web” is capitalized like this, “Web”. I don’t consider it a proper noun, but obviously the AP style does. My only guess is that when the word web became popular, it was a unique usage of the word so they capitalized it. I’m not sure though. That would take more research.
One of my favorite quotes that I found in the CNN interview with Mark Zuckerberg was this…
In advance of the announcement, which had Silicon Valley buzzing, Zuckerberg and other executives spoke to Fortune about the strategy. “We want to make Facebook into something of an operating system so you can run full applications,” Zuckerberg told me. He said Facebook is becoming a “platform,” meaning a software environment where others can create their own services, much the way anyone can write programs for Microsoft’s Windows operating system on PCs. Facebook, he explained, is a technology company, not a media one.
What is wrong with the sentence in bold?
Anyways, I like my article very much. It’s an improvement from the previous one on Last.fm. I kind of wish I had waited a week to write about Last.fm because I could have included how they got bought by CBS.
When I convince someone at the paper to post my article on the website, I’ll share the link. Until then, I’ll just be sad about it. Does anybody have any suggestions of notable internet stuff I could write about for the future?
I really like your article! I have mixed feelings about the Facebook applications. I’ve been trying a lot of them out. Some I’ve kept, others I’ve removed. Some are useful, work well, and look good. Others are pretty pointless, full of bugs, and/or are sloppily designed so they look bad on your profile. I wish there was some sort of quality assurance, just so that Facebook doesn’t slip down to the realms of MySpace. Overall though, I’m inclined to think the applications are a good thing, so long as the bugs are worked out.
moinkers
June 9, 2007 at 7:49 pm
A lot of them are just half-baked ideas. Because Facebook doesn’t allow some aspects to be edited, that inhibits what the developers can work with. Most of the time that means, they can’t change it to work in an ideal situation.
What’s interesting is that the top used applications are similar features that you can find on MySpace.
I’ve found 3 applications I like so far: Last.fm, Twitter and Digg. All of those applications though, are ones I frequently use outside of Facebook and are tied to actual websites and are somewhat useful. Who knows how long the bugs will exist though
blush_response
June 11, 2007 at 1:34 am
Thanks for the mention in this article. Facebook is absolutely trying to being the “ultimate” and “universal” social networking service (and beyond), but sometimes at the price of the users in terms of bugs?
Steven Bao
steve[at]stevenbao.com
ext_50893
June 15, 2007 at 9:29 pm
Hey, thanks for stopping by here.
I think its strange how some sites which are more popular outside of Facebook, got the shaft and are barely used on Facebook, while websites that are not as popular have very popular application counterparts.
blush_response
June 19, 2007 at 10:38 am