Comments on: Why build your app in Facebook?

By: Embracing Chaos » Blog Archive » Microsoft buys tiny stake in Facebook: Game on! - Leo Parker Dirac on Business and Technology Trends

Sat, 10 Apr 2010 16:21:23 +0000

[...] written before, their application platform is potentially game-changing because it’s very attractive for information service developers and democratizes the process of product development in a novel and powerful [...]

By: Andrew Musselman

Andrew Musselman — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 13:33:12 +0000

Here is Six Apart's announcement of things to come:

http://www.sixapart.com/about/news/2007/09/were_opening_th.html

By: leodirac

leodirac — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 14:27:18 +0000

The level of integration with facebook doesn't affect how much data of theirs you can use in your app. Almost nothing can be stored for more than 24 hours, regardless of how tightly coupled your app is. If you want to keep your app separate, you can use facebook for just login and keep the UI completely separate, polling their webservices for all the same data that you can get through FBML. FBML is just a display convenience. Integration into facebook's UI definitely gives you strong marketing opportunities, which is a good reason to do it.

I agree there are many good opportunities to make social networking data more open. And I agree that the trick is monetizing it. I'm very curious to see what Brad Fitzpatrick comes up with at Google. I know he was working on some ideas at Six Apart that had promise but IMHO weren't going far enough.

By: Josh Wright

Josh Wright — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 10:21:10 +0000

The issue, as I see it, is that you are fairly restricted on integrating Facebook data unless you are creating your app entirely within the Facebook ecosystem. I believe there exists an opportunity from another social networking site to create an API set that allows integration with no limits on where the integration occurs. Of course, monetizing that may be tricky…