This morning I had the fortune to speak with Tim Suzman, one of the developers of the immensely popular Graffiti application. Graffiti allows users to draw images and post them on your profile. While many people have posted less mature images, there are some amazing works that have been done. I have posted a couple of them at the end of this post. Be sure to check them out! Tim is a graduate of Brandeis university and is working on developing Facebook applications full-time with his team.

You have the 4th most popular application on Facebook with almost 4 million users as of today. Did you expect the application to be such a big hit?
We knew there was huge potential as soon as we saw the platform, though we obviously didn’t fully know what to expect… but once we launched a few days later, we could see almost immediately what was going to happen. Only grew to 40 users or so on the first day I think, but it was completely viral.

I see that there two other developers listed: Ted (who I’m assuming is your brother) and Mark Kantor. Are all 3 of you developers?
Yeah Ted is my brother. The three of us have been working together for several years. Ted and I do development, Mark does tons of other stuff, it works out great.

What challenges did you face in launching the Graffiti application?
I think we stayed up for three days straight without a minute of sleep And then we’d never scaled anything before past a single shared server. It was pretty wild trying to keep up, though magically Ted somehow knew what he was doing.

Your hard work is obviously paying off. How many offers have you received from others to be acquired or partner?
Maybe 6? Yeah about 6.

Any wild offers?
A couple were quite serious… but we’re not in a big hurry to get rid of this thing. Like I said earlier we’ve been working together for several years, and now that we’ve got a kind of hit, it’s really fun.

Have you come up with any effective ways of monetizing the application?
We haven’t had time to experiment much, but we threw a few ads on there which works out well enough.

There are thousands of developers and entrepreneurs that are working hard to duplicate your success. What advice would you provide to them?
The viral growth has slowed down compared to what we saw in the first couple of weeks, but there’s still a huge opportunity for new Facebook applications. I think we’re going to see some really great things in the coming weeks, and there’s room for those to grow. Some people have expressed concern that there’s a kind of unfair feedback loop — the most popular applications show up on the “recently popular list” and the “most users list” in the directory, and thus get a lot more exposure. But from what we can tell, most of our new users are not coming from the directory at all, so I don’t think it really matters that much. Just focus on making something awesome that takes advantage of the benefits of the Facebook platform.

Do you and your team have any other applications in the pipeline?
Yep.

Is there anything else that you would like to have mentioned on AllFacebook?
Some of the graffiti people have drawn has been incredible… several people have reported spending over 15 hours on a single piece. We’re working now on making a kind of public Gallery feature that people can submit their graffiti to for everyone to see. That’s our next step for Graffiti. Also, we are looking for an awesome developer who likes the startup environment.

Below are a couple drawings completed on the Graffiti application by Jeff Cattie:

Yesterday I covered the TouchGraph application which provides another way to visualize your Facebook friends’ relationships. In contrast to TouchGraph which provides a method of directly interacting and controlling the visualization, Friend Wheel (created by Thomas Fletcher and Tim Halbert) creates a static wheel that displays the relationships of your friends. I have a feeling that we will see more of these visualizations in the future. This one is fairly simple but creates a great looking wheel that is displayed on your profile. While this application will add to the clutter on your page, it is fun to try it out and see what your Friend Wheel looks like. If you want a cool way to visualize the interconnectedness of your friends, go grab the Friend Wheel application.

I always knew my friends were sexually depraved to a certain extent. I really had no idea how true this was until I installed the Socialmoth Facebook app just now. This app allows you and your friend to post anonymous confessions to a common message board. You can see what’s said, can “add a heart” if you like the comment, but you’ll never know who said what. Here are some of the more ‘interesting’ confessions in my network right now:

They said:

“I like orgies”

“I wish I was a lesbian so I’d stop getting screwed over by guys”

“I need really good sex in my life”

“I hate it when you kiss me because i know those lips have been on another girl”

“Everything that you think makes you unattractive…I adore.”

Seems to me that A) my friends are sexually frustrated and B) Socialmoth is pretty freaky C) There’s probably some way to connect friends anonymously who are looking for the same thing…eh hem…random hookups?

Regardless, Socialmoth is a really interesting application – it’s a keep in my book. If you want to make or read other’s anonymous confessions, go grab the SocialMoth application.

I love, love, love, love, love Elbo.ws; possibly the worlds best music blog aggregator. I noticed today that ‘itmay.be media’ wrote an app that cross references your music preferences (as defined by your profile) with the Elbo.ws blog network for mp3′s by those bands, and then links the mp3 to your profile. Having discovered 1000′s of amazing mp3 over the past two years (I wouldn’t dream of downloading copyrighted works of course) using the Elbo.ws service, I can only hope that this implementation will further augment the music discovery process that facebook users like me tend to get caught up in for hours and hours at a time. As a matter of fact, I just checked my profile and the Elbo.ws facebook app has identified “Death Cab For Cutie – Friday I’m In Love (Cure Cover)” as an mp3 I would like. Hot. You can get your Elbo.ws Facebook app here.

Yes! There is a lot of buzz going around the web about whether or not Facebook applications will continue to get acquired. This will continue for months (if not years) to come. Just as tons of web startups have received funding during the continuing web 2.0 boom, Facebook applications will get bought out at a frantic pace. There will be many more acquired at the start since companies will want to acquire highly successful applications. I’d predict that every week there will be one or two applications that make it big on Facebook. While it may be a land grab in the sense that there are only 25 million users adding applications (100 million by next year), compared to billions of people on the web, there will always be space for useful applications. While there won’t be as many acquisitions or large rounds of funding for Facebook and general social network applications, there will still be a fair amount. Just because it is easier to build an application on the Facebook platform than MySpace and other social networks, doesn’t mean that individuals have the capacity to build robust applications with large feature sets.

Facebook applications are getting acquired, everyone seems to be launching a widget, and Google has decided to join in on the widget economy. Yesterday, Marisa Mayer of Google announced Google Gadget Ventures. According to the site, “Google Gadget Ventures is a new Google pilot program dedicated to helping developers create richer, more useful Google Gadgets.” According to Read/Write/Web, the purpose of Google Gadget Ventures is to bootstrap “an economic ecosystem around gadgets.” For those developers that have already developed successful Google Gadgets (those that generate at least 250,000 weekly page views), there are seed investment grants of $100,000 available. Google knows that they need to become part of the widget economy, and this is their signal that they are taking it seriously. Also, given that most third party developers are currently working on Facebook applications, Google is trying to give an incentive to third party developers to build applications for their iGoogle product. In order to be successful in the current landscape, developers will have to release their applications across multiple platforms. Companies such as Clearspring & Widgetbox will surely thrive. If you are a third party developer, now is the time to burn the midnight oil and crank out widgets. It is an exciting time for the World Wide Widgets!

This has to be the coolest application that I have seen yet. The TouchGraph application allows you to visualize your friends that are connected to at least one other person in your network besides yourself. Ultimately this ends up displaying your closest friends through an amazing interface. Zoom in and view the pictures of your friends, drag networks and people around, and see which friends are the most connected to your other friends. This is hands down one of the sweetest applications I have seen yet. You can also visualize which of your friends overlap your various networks. If you are part of a lot of networks (and connected to those networks on Facebook) this application will surely keep you entertained for a while. So if you want to visualize your Facebook relationships, go grab the TouchGraph application. A demo video is posted below.

This application is definitely one of the more slick ones that I have come across. The Invites application allows you to send invitations to your friends for various events. It is built on the SaKi platform and has an extremely user friendly flash based interface. After accepting an invitiation it is displayed on your profile. Ultimately this is a complete substitute for Evite except that it is on Facebook. The only feature that is missing is the ability to invite people that aren’t within Facebook. If you want a simple way to handle invites for your next event go grab the Invites application.

I hate to keep handing out awards for dumb applications, but this one is pretty stupid. The Beers application, created by Break.com, allows you to show how many drinks you are currently consuming or consumed last night. It would be interesting if it kept a running tab of all the drinks that you have consumed, especially for those that are in college. Then at the end of their college career they can look back and view their Facebook profile which is filled with beer. I would surely have a few beers on my profile if that was the case. Chances are that I won’t be sitting in front of my computer on Facebook while consuming beers. For those that enjoy consuming beer while spending time on Facebook then this application is for you! Grab the Beers application to support your habit.

MyMiniLife, the highly popular widget that has been available on most of the other social networks, has just launched their Facebook widget. MyMiniLife is a flash based virtual world. Similar to SecondLife which allows you to purchase goods to place in your virtual home, MyMiniLife allows you to build your own properties (homes and parks) to place on your Facebook profile. You start off with $10,000 to purchase items such as furniture, electronics, lighting, and more. If you are looking for efficient transportation you can even buy your own helicopter. The only thing that I’ve purchased for my virtual home so far is a pretty nice plasma television. Next purchase is a computer so I can keep my blog running! If you want to have your own virtual house on your profile go grab the MyMiniLife application.