allfacebook - the unofficial facebook blog

Lately my friends in marketing and advertising have been asking me more and more about Facebook. Everybody knows they’re supposed to be using it, and a lot of people don’t know where to look to find consultants and developers. Their bosses ask them, and they ask me, and I recommend myself.. of course.

Facebook has solved this problem while sharing a piece of the pie with its devoted developers. They have set up a special marketplace for Facebook Platform developers to advertise their services, and they have pledged to send all potential development clients in that direction.

To be clear, this is no small opportunity for developers. It’s a massive market.

According to Dave Morin, Senior Platform Manager at Facebook, “Everyday the team here at Facebook talks with thousands of people, businesses, and some of the biggest brands worldwide who are looking to find contract development services, or developers to join their team. We’re planning on sending every single one of them to the Facebook Platform Marketplace, so the opportunity is huge!”

Those who realize just how important it is for brands to have a presence on Facebook will understand just how incredible it is that Facebook has setup an area for anybody to post ads for free, and that it plans to send customers there.

It will be very exciting for developers and potential clients alike, as it was pretty difficult to find a reputable coder if you were new to the game before. I would really like to see some sort of rating system and some requirements of legitimacy. I would absolutely hate to see it turn into a free, unregulated, unorganized freelance site with no individual accountability.

The only problem so far is that people looking for work seem to be posting in both categories (”developers wanted”, and “developers available”). Come on people.. play fair.

Kudos to Morin and the Facebook team. I’m sure I speak for the whole development community when I say “thanks!”

- Jonathan Kleiman

This morning Facebook announced that they are adding a Javascript animation suite for all Facebook developers. Given that Facebook uses FBJS instead of standard Javascript, they decided to develop their own library from scratch. After a few months of testing, the library is ready for public use.

As described in the animation wiki page, the new animation features are relatively robust. For those familiar with the scriptaculous library (as well as prototype), this new FBJS suite will appear familiar. The new library enables developers to modify page CSS, change the duration of animations and more. I think this new feature will be welcomed by developers.

As usual though when new features arrive, they tend to get overused. Just as the classic Javascript lightbox became overused within web design, I would imagine that these new animation features will become overused by application developers. If you see signs of this beginning to occur feel free to update us via the comments on this post or shoot us an email. If you’d like to learn more about adding animation to your applications, check out the wiki page.

Are you sick and tired of there being too many useless Facebook applications? Wish there were way too many? Well the EZ App Builder is here to grant that wish. The app exists to allow users to create their own applications in minutes with very little trouble, but ultimately it fails in its limitations.

Out of a lack of creativity I created an app that let’s you tell your friends you miss them to let you see what an app you can create looks like. While the instructions given to create your app are surprisingly clear, the EZ App Builder only lets you make one sort of app: the useless kind.

You’re limited to creating an application where users can do a thing to one another, such as tell someone they miss them, or some sort of poke, or the like. It does, however, allow you to easily take advantage of many of the viral tools Facebook offers.

The application that you create is adorned by 4 ads, one of which is your own: the rest belong to the parent application. One of the ads is incredibly poorly placed, right in the center, and reminds the user that the application was made by the EZ App Builder.

It’s definitely neat for a relative layperson to be able to make a custom application with ease. Given the limitations on substance, however, I will be very surprised if any of these simple applications gain any popularity in the long run. It’s relatively new, and they claim that new features will be rolled out shortly, so I think that the EZ App Builder is worth keeping an eye on.

-Jonathan Kleiman is the founder of Probook, Canada’s self-professed quintessential professional network, and CEO of CSSAGLOBAL, an offshore web and software development company based primarily in India and Canada.

First of all: if you read the headline, calm down.

As loyal readers will remember, I previously posted here that it might be possible to bypass the politics playing out between Facebook and Google by building a Facebook app acting as a container for OpenSocial gadgets. We now have a working version of the OpenSocket application, demonstrating some basic OpenSocial gadgets running inside Facebook!

The irony that Facebook can (sort of) support OpenSocial before MySpace does not escape me. It’s not really fair on MySpace to say that, though; I signed up to OpenSocial before they did! In many ways, we’re strengthening Facebook’s position: demonstrating OpenSocial on their platform means they can rightly claim their platform was ‘open’ - or at least flexible - in the first place.

Our container has rudimentary support for all of the OpenSocial functionality that can be found in Ning and Hi5’s current sandboxes. The plan is to release the code as open source to enable developers to wrap their own gadgets as Facebook apps. While that will never be as satisfactory as writing a native Facebook version of a gadget, it would be a quick way to port it to Facebook while full development is underway. More likely, the project will allow interested developers to study the differences between the two platforms.

To protect the Facebook platform from any OpenSocial diseases, the demonstration application only allows use of approved gadgets hosted on our OpenSocket web site. If you are interested in seeing your gadget within Facebook, you can send it to us and we will check it for ‘unscrupulousness’ before hosting it.

So what would Google make of this stunt? It demonstrates the potential ubiquity of their new standard. As a beta-release, OpenSocial has some promising aspects; I will write a follow-up post describing my experiences with the platform - which have stoked some concerns about the leadership Google needs to show if it is to consolidate into a usable standard.

Aside from being a curiosity right now, I hope we can expand the OpenSocket project to develop more open source libraries for social network developers; there is a lot of code being repeatedly reinvented by many developers that could be shared and augmented for the benefit of all, and not to the erosion of any competitive advantage.

I agree with Lee Lorenzen’s assessment that a project porting the many Facebook applications to OpenSocial would have more value than our OpenSocket work so far. For the time being though, the direction I have chosen is “funnier” - not to mention, easier… Perhaps his suggestion is something we can look into next. If you are interested in joining in, please see our main site!

[Dan Lester is a professional holidaymaker and an amateur social network consultant. He developed OpenSocket with the invaluable help of his new friend Ignacio Blanco.]

Last night, Facebook announced that they are now offering test accounts for developers. This was a serious problem for a lot of developers wishing to test out their application. Developers were forced to create false accounts resulting in possible suspension of those accounts. It appears as though Facebook understands your pain developers! Creating a test account is simple:

• Make sure you have installed the developers application
• Login under the account that you don’t plan on using for real
• Go to the following url: http://www.facebook.com/developers/become_test_account.php
• Your account has been registered as a test account!

One thing to note is that test accounts are not visible to real accounts and vice versa. Also, you can make a test account from an existing account but all of your friends will disappear. If you want to read more information about the new update, go check out the Test Accounts wiki page.

Over the past few months, Facebook has witnessed a growing base of dedicated platform developers. Launching hundreds of applications a day, these developers are hoping to grab a piece of the extremely valuable Facebook real estate. Except for the Linux and Microsoft operating systems, I have never seen such a dedicated base of developers. These developers are working night and day to launch what they hope to be the next popular application on Facebook. There’s one thing that Facebook gets to enjoy currently: no competition.

Facebook is not simply a social network, they are a social platform and currently there is nobody in the space. Facebook will have a whopping 6 month lead on all competitors (at a minimum) and that lead may continue to grow. What will happen when the new platforms launch though? Are the 120,000 developers (120,000 have added the developer application but the majority have not built an app) that are currently on Facebook going to go to another platform? Definitely!

Facebook has been working hard to help build a developer community through their Facebook Developer Garages (as I posted about yesterday) and through the developer forum. I would guess that we are going to see a significant slowdown in the growth of new applications once MySpace and competing platforms launch. Those developers that have built significant properties on Facebook will continue to be dedicated to Facebook but they are also going to try to expand outside of Facebook. The developers that have not built a significant presence due to the increasing barrier to success are going to go elsewhere and potentially not look back.

So what does Facebook need to do? Well there are a number of things (some of which I will be covering in the next couple days), but the primary thing is to continue providing significant incentives to developers. As the likelihood of building a large user base on Facebook (without investing in marketing) decreases, Facebook is going to need to provide new services and offerings for developers. Any suggestions about what those should be?

I just found out a new project that Dave Cohen of San Francisco is working on that is pretty sweet! Earlier this month I posted about a content management system on Facebook. Within weeks it looks Dave has successfully ported over Drupal into Facebook. While Dave is not complete with the project (view screen shots below), he is coming along nicely. He has successfully ported the website, “Drupal for Facebook” into the Drupal for Facebook application.

When this is complete, it is going to suddenly become much easier to develop robust communities on the Facebook platform. I have sent a message to Dave to find out if this is an open project or if it is just his and is friends. While I haven’t heard back yet, I will be sure to post a follow-up for any developers that want to participate in the project. Alternatively, you can simply post a comment below if you would like to contribute. It will be interesting so see how far along this goes in the coming weeks. Being a developer myself, I can speak from experience when I say this is surely a challenging task. Best of luck to Dave in completing the project! We will be excited to see the final app.

Drupal for Facebook About Page

Drupal for Facebook Forum

Last night Facebook announced a new stats page for developers. The new statistics are nothing to brag about. The only additional information that is being displayed is the total number of adds, removes, blocks and unblocks from the previous day. Additionally you can view the status returns of each page request. All of these things are statistics that developers should be tracking internally anyways.

While the new statistics are extremely limited, it does show Facebook’s intention to eventually display more detailed statistics. What would be nice to see is some sort of advanced analytics that displays demographic information for each page being viewed. I’ve been hearing that Facebook is going to release an analytics package around the same time that they launch their new advertising platform. Analytics are going to be critical to the success of their advertising platform. Google has been successful with detailed analytics. It is now time for Facebook to show that they can provide more detailed analytics based on detailed demographic information, especially if they are going to be considered a 10 or 15 billion dollar company.

If you ever questioned Facebook’s dedication to its developer base, this should lower your concerns a little. Facebook has launched a public bug tracking system. While not a huge development undertaking, given that they leveraged the Bugzilla bug tracking system, all complaints were previously being emailed and posted in the developer forum. Want to track the status of your bug? Simply log in to bugzilla.

This is going to make it much easier for Facebook to track all the issues they are having with the platform. One thing that I wonder about the new bug tracking system is whether or not the system should be used to file complaits about applications being shut down (as Jason Beckerman previously experience) and similar complaints which aren’t necessarily development oriented. One thing is for sure: Facebook is dedicated to developers that are building applications on their platform.

The better the relationship between Facebook and the developers, the better relationships will be between developers and clients. Now the only step left for Facebook is to launch some sort of general support inquiry line. I would imagine Facebook will eventually have a call center in India answering all responses, especially if they end up raising another $500 million.

For those developers that were having troubles building new applications because they had so many in development as well as in production, worry no longer. Last night, Facebook updated the maximum number of API keys per developer from 10 to 100. This will surely make room for those that have an overload of applications! The only downside to this is that those that are looking to poach Facebook URLs will now have a higher limit.

Perhaps that’s why they discreetly posted about it as a platform status update rather than on their blog or in their developer news. Whatever their rationale, this will definitely make life easier for many of us. Facebook is truly showing their dedication to making the developers happier.

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