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.)

More details on the event can be found here.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The theme was “Don’t fail to scale” and the presentation I gave on “Scaling a Facebook application” can be downloaded here. In outline, the points covered within the talk were:

• Different application types and their implications for scaling
• Our experiences of growing “Six Degrees of Separation”
• Tips and tricks specific to the Facebook platform
• How growth was achieved
• Keeping users informed

“Scaling a Facebook application”

It’s a fine line to tread, however, and the recent additions to the newsfeed seem to be taking the site into a dangerous zone. On the one hand, the newsfeed does allow people to see what their friends are doing without having to put much effort in, and allows for all kinds of serendipitous discoveries. (”What an interesting group, I think I’ll join!” and “I didn’t realise you were interested in…”)

On the other hand, it can easily turn people off if the relevancy drops off and the volume becomes overwhelming. “5 of your friends received Funwall posts” is of no interest to me and although I can “vote down” the relevancy, I’m sure there’ll be some new fad next month that five of my friends will all happen to do at the same time and I’ll have to vote it down again.

The encouragement to spam is no more active than with application design. In fact: the viral nature of application growth, almost by definition, encourages spamming of friends as a way of surviving and spreading. “Invite 10 friends to unlock new gifts” and the like are usually enough encouragement, and somehow the “ethos” of Facebook means most of us have little compunction in at least spamming those closer friends. After all: they can always click on the “ignore” button.

We’ve experimented with the principle ourslves. Applications such as Which Dessert Are You? give the user a very basic reward for inviting their friends and that, in itself, seems to be enough to spread the application. The content, and usefulness, are both close to non-existent, yet the app is spreading at the rate of thousands per day.

It’s a simple equation: if each person manages to spread your application to more than one person it will grow. If it’s less than one, it won’t. On the plus side (from a commercial point of view) it’s a great environment to spread brand awareness by capitalising on the currently acceptable face of spam, but on the other it’s a challenge for Facebook to keep these invites and newsfeed messages enough on the side of useful (compared to annoying) for us to put up with it.

1. Six Degrees of Separation: Currently just over 140,000 users, and generated nearly 900,000 page views over the past month.
2. Which Vegetable Are You?: This has grown from nothing to 36,000 users in 2 weeks.
3. Catch!: This one’s struggling more but has just over 1,500 users in 2 weeks.

It’s been an interesting experiment seeing what Facebook users like to see in their applications. At one end of the scale there’s usefulness and interest (as Six Degrees has some of), and at the other there’s fun and minimum effort, which Which Vegetable? covers. Catch!, on the other hand, has some good functionality but just isn’t quite viral enough yet. We’ll be putting some effort into that over the coming weeks to see if widening the interaction between friends will give it a push.

There are plenty more Facebook applications queueing up to be developed, both from ourselves and clients, and everyone’s learning more and more with each one.