Facebook applications aren't that social, or useful

It’s been just about more than a year (if I’m correct) since the release of F8, Facebook’s platform for developers to create ‘social’ applications which Facebook users can add to their profiles and make merry. Just about more than a year later, a browse through the top 10 applications (ranked by use) shows the problem. Well, not so much of a problem; considering there is nothing wrong, but more of a worry. Atleast for me.

You see it? No?

Utterly useless

Not more than 2% of the applications have any ‘use’ value. The only part of Facebook ‘from’ Facebook they use is the userbase. Not their details. Them. These applications are trying to come up with any little excuse to make people invite more people to use them. Take ‘SuperWall’ or ‘FunWall’ for example.

These two applications do ‘nothing’ more than what the native Facebook Wall does not. The only difference? There is no difference! It’s just that people don’t know that their wall can do all those things, and more. And yet, they are top of the list, ranks one and two respectively.

What makes them tick

It seems people flock towards applications that are ‘fun’. Not necessarily useful. Application makersI’ll not call them developers, since they’re just coding; not really developing anything seem to understand this, and are resorting to making their applications dumber, and dumber so that it appeals to the common person. I can give you proof with my very own applications here.

I have three:

1. So much to do!: This is a simple to-do list tracking application, which allows you to make lists, and show it those lists on your profile.
2. Photos2RSS: This allows you to get photos from anywhere in Facebook as feed (RSS/JSON), which can be further used anywhere feeds can be used.
3. Thought for the day: Another simple application to show a ‘thought’ or a quote on your profile. It also lets you tag quotes as favourites, and share them with friends.

Take a quick guess as to the order of ranks based on number of users of those applications. Answer’s at the end of the post.

So, to come back to the point I was making. I don’t know what Zuckerberg’s main motive was to creating the platform, and allowing people to develop applications on it. Maybe this ‘was’ what he wanted. Maybe it isn’t. But on thing is for sure. This defininitely undermines the genius behind the technical proficiency of F8. I can only begin to imagine the kind of work that has gone into it, and the amount of effort that goes into it everyday for maintainence and cleanup. The use it has been put to till date, doesn’t even begin to do justice to it.

Sure, it got more users to Facebook. It added value to your profile, and increased the worth of every user. But from a broader perspective, it hasn’t added ‘anything’ at all to Facebook in itself. There is no application which will make people join Facebook, because it’s true potential is only visible when you use it on the social level.

I’m currently making another application. I’ll be all hush hush about it until I’m ready to release it. It only grazes the ideas I’ve touched here, because honestly, it ‘will’ take some serious brain racking to be able to come up with a concept like that. If someone can, it should be worthy of a job at Facebook itself.

Eitherways, valued at $15 billion plus, Facebook will make him a rich guy ;)

The answer

As far as the answer to the question in the post goes, it’s:

1. Thought for the day
2. So much to-do!
3. Photos2RSS

What did you think? The geek app will have most users? Phsshh… You obviously didn’t read the post properly :P

A small success!

Checking today (‘today’ being the second day of this application being included in the application repository), I see 400+ users, out of which 4 are friends. These past two days have shown exactly what people meant by the Facebook ‘social graph’ and ‘viral distribution’ of applications. I noticed some applications become big time earners overnight, but a small application like my to–do list getting these many users in 2 days is very, very heartening :)

So, now I’m going to have a look at the whole Facebook development scenario:

F8 Platform

The platform, at its heart is a REST based API. You make simple calls to one URL, with the required details, and the server sends back whatever you asked for after running a few checks to see if you “can” get the data you asked for. It’s quite simple that way. There are tokens, session keys (there are two types, more later), API keys and all the regular boobah that you’re used to seeing. However, it gets interesting when you begin to move away from this REST API.

Facebook is one of the first APIs (that I’ve seen in my short stint with webdev) that offers direct access to their SQL tables. Ofcourse, they call it FQL, but the outcome is the same. You select columns, where certain conditions are matched and validated, from some tables. This not only saves time, but reduces server load, since you’re going to the heart of the data instead of being proxy–ed around.

Finally, there’s FBML, which is Facebook’s version of (X)HTML. It offers RDF–type tags which get parsed by Facebook into proper data wrapped in relevant tags. This is used when your application has a profile presence box, and you need to show stuff in it. You update it with FBML using a given function. Or if you want to show editing options for features for your app. It’s quite cool! :)

Static content is cached by Facebook for faster serving (like images, videos etc.), but most of the load is on the developers servers. All processes happen on your servers, and Facebook only acts as a mediator between your server and the user, so that they can control what comes and goes through.

The development

If you know how frameworks and APIs work, this will be familiar grounds. Even if you don’t, you can figure your way out by getting yourself the REST Clients from Facebook. It’s got functions to do everything, and all you need to do is call them. I use the PHP5 Client, but there are clients available for pretty much every major language used for Webdev today.

It’s been a breeze getting the hang of it (thanks to a lot of help from Stephen, as usual), and just having access to such huge amounts of data is amazing. With all coding projects, you have to figure out how to get around some hurdles. For example, the current system allows the authorization token to be passed to only “one” page per app. That means, you can’t call Facebook from any other page, unless you have an infinite session key to pass around. It takes some figuring out, but once you get the hang of it, you can see a pattern emerging. I personally think Facebook should allow choosing custom pages (via. a “next” query string which they use, but don’t allow access to) to which you’d like to redirect to from Facebook. But oh well …

Pretty much all workings with applications will require you to store data of some sort (if it’s a decent to good app). For that, you’ll need to know SQL if you want to work with relational tables. I use Ning at the moment, which offers a different way of storing huge amounts of data. I am adequately adept at SQL though, and plan to brush up on it since I want to move to my own hosting soon enough, and host my apps from there. You will need to know all this to make an effective application. There are workarounds, sureLike the “X Me” application, which didn’t deal with tables in the beginning, but used to constantly read the current markup in the profile box, alter it using regular expressions, and then put it back. For example, if someone would hide an action, it would set it to display:none instead of actually removing it. I got my info from the maker himself :), but I’d suggest you do it the right way.

The documentation is grossly incomplete, but then which documentation isn’t. If you want help, the Developer’s Discussion Group is always there, and people like me who can help you out. There’s also an unofficial IRC room at #facebook on irc.freenode.org. That’s a fabulous place to get info, “if” the people are in a good mood :P

Final thoughts

All in all, it’s not hard making an application for Facebook, and for people who want to start getting their hands dirty with webdev, this is probably the safest and best way to start. You don’t have to looking for data. It’s all there. All you have to do is call for it :) Also, you should be creative. Don’t try to re–invent the wheel and make something that already exists. Your app will get stifled because the other app will already have an established base. There are so many things you can make, it’s not even funny! Just rack your brains a little … ;)

So, I hope I’ve cleared things out, and hope to see someone from my readers come up with a great application for Facebook :) Let me know if you do!

(P.S. — My app users count went up to 403 while writing this article! :P That’s how quickly apps can catch on :) )

Facebook photos! Who needs Flickr? #

People not on Facebook probably use Flickr as their main image host, because it’s easier to share it with people, tag them, and store them safely knowing you won’t lose them. Flickr, backed by Yahoo!, has surely become an essential part of the netizen’s arsenal of web–services, no doubt that. But, as with everything, there are alternatives which though not as good, are good enough substitutes.

Facebook Photos

Facebook Photos is one of the best “organised” photo collection tool available on the Internet today in my opinion. Sure, it lacks features which people have gotten used to because of Picasa Web Albums and Flickr, but if you’re looking for a simple photo storage service, with decent sharing and commenting features, this one is for you.

The best part is, you’re not bound by features being rolled out by the provider. Applications can enhance your experience, and act as plug–ins, which brings me to the main point of this post. Let me present to you, Photos2Rss!

Photos2RSS

This was an application I wrote initially to take away my dependence on Flickr, especially since I found out the 200 image limit on the free account. The one feature which doesn’t come natively with the Photos application of Facebook is a way to get them out of Facebook. Your photos are sitting nicely in your album, but that way they’re only for your friends to see and enjoy. What if you want to share them on your blog, or some other place? Well, now there is a way …

If you’re on Facebook, add the application to your profile. The application doesn’t add a profile box or anything. It just sits pretty in your list of applications in the sidebar, and you can push it down in the ‘hide’ zone if you don’t want to see the link all the time.

Once you have it installed, it’ll take you to the album selection page. There you can select who’s albums you want to pull out as a feed. If you want a friend’s, you’ll need their UIDThat's the 9 digit number at the end of the URL on the profile page of your friend.. Fill that in, and you’ll be presented with a list of their albums. Along with that, there are options for randomising the pictures, and a total count. You can specify these for further control on how your photos are pulled. After filling in the details, you’ll have to submit once, before choosing the feed format.

There are two feed formats available currently—RSS and JSON(P). RSS is for subscribing to someone’s albums to track it for changes. Say, your friend’s birthday pictures. Whereas JSON(P) is more for use with codes and hacks on blogs and pages. Add in the callback function name at the end and the data will be enclosed nicely in your function :)

Drawbacks and limitations

As I said, this is a little hacky, hence there are some pre–requirements, assumptions and limitations in place for this to work like it’s supposed to. To start with, the photos you want to pull out have to be part of one album, and one album alone. You can pull in photos from different albums, but not using the same feed. Well, not yet atleast. If there are enough adopters of this, I’ll add it inI’ll add it in anyways sometime in the future to find the easiest way to do it, but more users will speed up the process :P.

The second thing is, the application needs to be a part of your list, because that’s the way I’ll get an infinite session key from Facebook for the feed. If you don’t add it, the feed will fail because it’ll need to log in to get your photos out. Like I said, it doesn’t ‘add’ anything to your profile like most of the applications, so there is no clutter :) I don’t like clutter myself :P Once you add it, you can get as many feeds as you want, for as many albums as you want.

These are the only ones for now :) With more complexities, some more might creep in, but I'll try and keep them at a minimum :)

So, I hope you find it useful, and bugs and feature suggestions as usual can be messaged, posted on the application’s wall, my wall, or in the comments here :) Enjoy!

bVibes get some Facebook love

bVibes is our very own Digg, for bloggers! Created by the elite hacker Ramani, I think it’s something the bloggerosphere needed more than the blogosphere in general. It’s about time Blogger started getting the attention it deserves, and blogs hosted at Blogger the credibility and respect they deserve.

I recently joined up, and it’s picked up quite well! Users are joining up pretty quickly, and stories are being submitted even quicker :P But as usual, enough is never enough! So now, bVibes is getting some love, Facebook style! My recent fascination with the Platform and a mail from Ramani were enough … and we now have a bVibes application for you to add to your profilesIf you’re not on Facebook yet, I suggest you start with that the moment you finish reading this post.

The application basically does what the normal Digg.com application does. It shows the stories you’ve recently voted for in a nice little box on your profile. As things are, there is a half an hour delay between new votes showing up … I might try to fix that, but I’m sure you can live with that :P You can also tell the application how many of your recently voted for stories do you want to show (Digg’s app doesn’t allow this, hah!), or a default of 5 will be enforced. The app also shows how many votes a story has :)

So, do your share of the good work. Show off the posts you think deserve attention right on your Facebook profile, where it’ll be seen by all your friends! Let them get the exposure they deserve!

All bugs, suggestions and feedback can be posted in the comments here, or messaged to me via Facebook. Enjoy!

Facebook has the lead!

I’ve been obsessing with Facebook for the past week because of the revelation of the new Facebook Platform. What that has in turn done is show me the intricate ways in which Facebook works. How different components come together to integrate themselves to the central goal of Facebook—to keep people connected to each other.

I think Facebook in itself is way ahead of the competition because of their goal. They aim not to have tons of users. Their userbase is a result of constant innovation. They aim to improve the networks that exist, and improve the interactions between the users of the networks. They are probably the only network which emphasizes on innovating, and I think that focus is what keeps them ahead.

Facebook Platform

Some see the platform as going against Facebook’s goal. I felt the same way when it first came out, but as time has passed, and I’ve seen the applications that have popped up, I can guess where Facebook is coming from. They’re not trying to foray into any foreign territory (even if they’ve inadvertently done so). They are trying to make Facebook the one stop destination for all it’s members to find info (about everything) about their friends and the people they know. Applications to track someone’s music, activities and calendar are some of the one’s which have popped up, with some of them becoming very popular. The popularity of applications is thanks to Facebook’s social graph, and what I like to call, the Wavefront effectHuygen's principle states that every wavefront acts as the source of another wavelet. Applying that logic to how news feeds work, when someone adds an application, it shows up in their news–feed, bringing it to the attention to their friends. Their friends then add it, hence starting a new wavefront.. The beauty of this is that the one thing that developers spend most amount of time doing is trying to get their applications to the public. Facebook does that for them, so they can concentrate on building killer apps.

This is very tempting to someone like me, developers, who don’t have resources to consolidate data. Facebook provides the data. All we have to do is use our creativity to use that in ways we think people would want to use them. I don’t see Facebook platform as a detachment from their primary goal. I see it as a natural evolution.

Facebook bloat

Many complain about many of the features as ‘bloat’ and unnecessary, wanting to revert back to the old Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg once said:

Change can be disorienting, but we do it because we’re sure it makes the site better. It may have felt different at first, but things like photos, events, groups and the wall have all made Facebook a more useful and interesting site.

It’s our goal to provide a tool that helps people understand what’s going on with the people around them; all of our additions and changes contribute towards this goal. The new things we’re going to launch will do the same.

And all the current features achieve all this in perfect harmony with each other. I can’t imagine a Facebook without the news/mini–feed. That is truly the major thing that sets it apart. The first thing I want to see when I log in is what my friends have been upto since I last logged in. Who their new friends are, what events they’re attending, what pictures they’ve added, what groups they joined … all those things. If I have to go to each and every profile to check what they’ve been doing, it beats the whole purpose of being part of a network … the information should come to you automaticallyThere was an internal joke here in my hostel, that you remove the feeds, and all the information that Facebook gives you, and you have an Orkut!!

The reason I see the competition not being able to catch up with Fb anymore, is simply because of the path Fb chose and the path the others took. Fb declined the offer by Yahoo! simply to preserve what they had in their own vision. Networks like Orkut have become stagnant, or interfaces to integrations of different services by the parent company, which almost borders on advertisement of those services. Sure, the users are getting all the features that they’d normally want from a network, but they are not getting the ‘integrated’ experience. The different services don’t come together to work together. They are just there working in their own separate modules and cubicles. You’ll never get to know when someone (on Orkut, say) adds a new video or new photo about the party they attended last night. Fb can achieve this by putting two and two together (photos being uploaded after an event the previous day, follows a nice pattern) because the different applications are part of the mothership, and all data finally goes back to a central server, not different parts of the world. That is the key difference between in–house productions and acquisitions. But that is not the point to this…

The point becomes (or remains) that Facebook got a lot of things right, at the perfect time. It helped that the brain behind the concepts was a college kid himself, being able to get into the head of other college kids. And if Facebook continues the same way, there is no–way their getting dethroned as the best social network to be a part of (because it’s just plain and simple cool!)!