1 May 2008, by Karl Bunyan
The next London Facebook Developer Garage is on Wednesday May 7th 2008. I'll be doing a quick run-through of the Facebook applications to watch at the moment. 
The next London Facebook Developer Garage is on Wednesday May 7th 2008. More details of the event are on Facebook and you can buy tickets for the event here.
I’ll be doing a quick run-through of the Facebook applications to watch at the moment. We also have:
- Andrew Davies from Idiomag tells us all about Idiomag, the music magazine application.
- Jon Mitchell from Spotify with news of a new music accessing app which is free, legal and easy to use.
- Geoff Hughes on how to get the best out of Networking
- Dan Lester- Let’s us know how you can use his Opensocket app to convert Open Social gadgets into their own Facebook apps.
- Andrew Mills and Daniel Denning tells us the news on the new ITN App
- Kristian Segerstrale - Playfish enlighten us on the history of video games leading to social games on Facebook
- Vanessa Barnett from BLP Law keeps us up to date with the Legals and Terms of Service.
- Toby Beresford on what’s new on the platform this month and Karl Bunyan spots the apps to watch
The event takes place at Sun Microsystems, 45 King William Street, London. (Just on the approach to London Bridge.)
May 1, 2008 at 9:07 am
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16 February 2008, by Karl Bunyan
The Facebook application world has recently been plagued by a slightly underhand practice of forcing users to invite friends to an application in order to access information.
The Facebook application world has recently been plagued by a slightly underhand practice of forcing users to invite friends to an application in order to access information. Often, this has taken the form of a quiz where the user is asked a series of questions and then, before being shown their result, must invite 10 or 20 friends. At this point the user has already spent time in the application and may continue by spamming their friends or, as many have been doing, joined groups and complained to Facebook about the practice.
It seems that Facebook is taking note and may start to clamp down on applications that implement this practice. This notice on the Facebook Developers pages outlines the main approach, and more explicit detail is written in the platform policy.
February 16, 2008 at 6:18 pm
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8 February 2008, by Karl Bunyan
I attended the MySpace developer platform launch last night and it was quite interesting not only to see how the platform will work but also by how MySpace's approach seems to be differing from Facebook
I attended the MySpace developer platform launch last night and it was quite interesting not only to see how the platform will work (which can be be determined to a certain extent from the developer documentation) but also by how MySpace’s approach seems to be differing from Facebook which, after all, does have both the advantages and disadvantages of being a first-mover.
For a start, there seemed to be much more effort to engage with the developer community. Whether this is real or for show, given a percieved shortfall of Facebook in this area and an opportunity to capitalise on the reaction, is impossible to tell. On the one hand taking the approach of letting the developers see things early is good, but on the other we don’t want to be seen as guinea pigs helping MySpace iron out all the kinks in their beta at our expense. Perhaps I’m cynical but I’ll keep the jury out for the moment.
As an example: even the London development team for MySpace had only had a few days visibility of the platform before having to attend the launch events and try and talk meaningfully about possibilities. That’s quite fast moving by anybody’s standards, although I do hope they don’t fall into the trap of “release, test, patch and re-release” that Facebook’s platform seems to do.
The platform itself is different from Facebook but the main components are very similar: profile boxes, canvas pages, but (and this is extremely interesting) there is also a new component of the homepage box. This is a limitation of Facebook applications in that it’s actually quite hard for an application to tell a user about things they might be interested in. To see an app, they need to look at their own profile page, or click through to the application itself. Now I don’t know about everyone but I don’t look at my own profile that often. Being able to put something in front of the user as soon as they log in as MySpace will could be very powerful. Facebook may adopt this too, although perhaps not as it could lead to a cluttered page (which, after all, seems to be all well and good for MySpace but Facebook is much more controlling).
Anecdotal evidence suggests that the platform itself is still rather buggy and can’t quite be considered even a beta version yet. However it certainly all looks promising. Whether MySpace users will take to applications in the same way as Facebook users I can’t say yet, but it’s going to be worth some experimentation.
February 8, 2008 at 4:18 pm
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28 January 2008, by Karl Bunyan
Facebook's new JavaScript client library will allow Facebook applications to be served from any website. This could open the door to Facebook applications on MySpace, for example.
Facebook have just announced a JavaScript library to access their API from any site. That may seem like a very small, technical improvement on their API but it has one important benefit: Facebook applications do not have to be served within Facebook any more.
Similarly to Open Social, it will now be possible to build a Facebook application that will work on any website yet use the friends network, notifications, stories and all the other functionality of Facebook. For instance: Facebook widgets could now be deployed on MySpace.
It will be interesting to see how the change starts to appear in applications and if there’s an appetite for using Facebook as a platform in the way that the creators are hoping.
January 28, 2008 at 7:18 pm
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24 January 2008, by Karl Bunyan
The presentation to go with the talk I gave at the Facebook Developer Garage last night is available for download.
The presentation to go with the talk I gave at the Facebook Developer Garage last night is available for download here.
I covered a few areas:
- What can and can’t be done on the Facebook mobile platform
- What an application looks like on Facebook mobile
- Using HTML on application pages
- Integration with SMS features of the Facebook API
- Good and bad points of the features offered
Download Exponetic’s Facebook Mobile presentation.
January 24, 2008 at 11:16 am
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