stef's posterous

Facebook apps are the new black

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". Want one too? Get in touch :-)