Facebook attracts developers -- and controversy
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(InfoWorld) - Many Web developers these days feel a sleep-depriving mix of unbridled enthusiasm and nagging concern over Facebook's social-networking platform. Opened to external developers three months ago, the Facebook platform and tools are well designed and offer developers generous revenue opportunities rare among social networks, along with a fast-growing and deeply engaged community of people. However, this paradise is already getting soiled by developers who, eager to spur the adoption of their applications, design them with self-promotion features that many say are deceitful and trigger annoying and abusive actions,Â such asÂ bulk unsolicited e-mails and intrusive message displays. Although Facebook has acknowledged the problems and in recent weeksÂ outlined corrective measures, it's critical for the company to quickly tighten its rules and unleash stricter penalties, developers say. "It's definitely a problem that needs to be solved. There are additional steps Facebook could and should take," said Ali Partovi, CEO of iLike, which rebuilt its music-discovery site within Facebook in May. As things stand now, the situation is a cat-and-mouse game, with developers seeking and exploiting loopholes in its terms of service and the company plugging them after the fact, he said. By then, however, the damage is done, and the developer who exploited the loophole boosted adoption of his application, to the detriment of competitors who respect the terms' spirit, Partovi said. That prompts honest developers to look for the next loophole as a defensive competitive measure. "That creates an unnecessarily bad environment," he said. "If the rules were simply enforced with clearer penalties, these companies would all fall into line quickly." Partovi said his company has been watching this situation from the sidelines, because, in its category, iLike has a dominant position and feels little competitive pressure. But he sympathizes with developers embroiled in competition with each other. "When you see your direct competitor exploiting a loophole and growing very rapidly and beating you, it's hard to resist the temptation," he said. "To some extent the blame is on Facebook." This comes from someone who otherwise couldn't be happier with the Facebook platform and with the effect it has had on his company. In just three months, the iLike Facebook application has close to 7 million users, almost twice as many as on the company's own Web site, leading to a doubling of the company's revenue, Partovi said. Unlike other social-networking sites, which limit the revenue-generating capabilities of external applications, Facebook has a policy widely considered generous, letting development companies run ads and engage in other commercial activities. This has contributed greatly to the attractiveness of the platform for developers. At press time, Facebook's directory showedÂ more thanÂ 3,500 applications built for the site by outside developers. "The monetization is one of the most unique things they are doing," said Tim O'Shaughnessy, a co-founder and partner at Hungry Machine, which has developed about 15 Facebook applications. "That's what's causing the fervor over the application development. People are looking at the potential to enhance their business. It's not just a distribution play. It can put real dollars in your pocket." Joseph Aigboboh, co-founder of J-Squared Media,Â another Facebook developer, agreed. "Facebook has created an opportunity to build literally any product and spread it virally to achieve unprecedented rates of growth and retention. This means that with a relatively cheap budget, companies can build lucrative products and services [and] drive revenue," he wrote in an e-mail. It's no surprise then that some developers have been overeager in their attempts to boost adoption of their applications and generate revenue, while looking for ways to bend the rules. This week, Dave Morin, Facebook's senior platform manager, addressed the concerns about annoying and abusive applications in an official blog posting, and announcedÂ steps have already been taken, with more coming. Facebook wants the popularity of applications determined by how useful and entertaining they are. Thus, it's shifting how it measures application popularity in its applications directory away from total users and toward user engagement, he wrote. Vowing to protect members' experiences on the site, he said the latest release of the Facebook Markup Language -- version 1.1 -- changes how profile boxes display content, removing applications' ability to display profile content to visitors and hide it from profile owners. The company is also limiting applications' ability to contact members to crack down on spamming of deceptive and misleading notifications. Facebook's user experience has traditionally been considered significantly more elegant, controlled, and organized than the one from key rival and social-networking leader MySpace. Although MySpace remains more popular, Facebook has been gaining momentum for the past 12 months. Its user ranks have ballooned to 37 million active users today from 12 million in December.Â More thanÂ half of its active members return to the site daily. A company called Slide, which creates "widget" applications for social-networking sites and is big on MySpace, jumped on the chance to set up shop on Facebook, which has quickly become one of its most important platforms. Although Slide has created some of the most popular Facebook applications, its detractors have criticized it for engaging in some of the inappropriate tactics flagged by Morin. But Slide's CFO Kevin Freedman said that Slide is as interested as anyone else in providing a good user experience on Facebook and elsewhere. "We listen to our users' feedback first and foremost. Regarding some of those [critical] comments, we haven't necessarily seen the same response from our users and that's really what drives us," Freedman said. Chris Kirkland, CEO of MrKirkland.com, a Web design and development firm, has created three applications for Facebook, but has been unimpressed with the developer program. "I very much consider Facebook to be 'learning on the job' with the development platform," Kirkland wrote in an e-mail. The tools and resources Facebook provides to developers could be better, he wrote. "Overall we have been extremely disappointed. The documentation is reasonable, though sometimes inaccurate, but by far our main complaint is the diabolically poor level of communication. We have a feeling that we are dealing with a bunch of overbusy college kids," Kirkland wrote. He blames this lack of communication for a situation that led Facebook to yank one of his company's applications from the site with, he says, nary an explanation and, in his view, without justification. The application, designed to let members track visits to their profiles, received initial approval from Facebook, but then the company turned around and banned it because it lacked a feature Kirkland says they never told him would be required. He's fuming that a similar application from a competitor continues on the site. "We were given no opportunity to alter the application, no warnings that they would do this, and my attempts at discussing the erroneous TOS reports with Facebook merely received generic replies," he wrote. Aigboboh, of J-Squared Media,Â also sees room for improvement in communicating with developers. "The main issue we see is that Facebook doesn't allow its developer community to interact with Facebook itself very well," he wrote, adding that he suspects Facebook is aware of this and working to correct it. On a related matter, Hungry Machine's O'Shaughnessy, echoing others interviewed, said Facebook could also do a better job of giving developers advance notice of changes on the platform back end that require applications to be adjusted. Ultimately, most developers interviewed said they hope Facebook will rein in the overeager developers and smooth the other wrinkles in the program. "The platform is still very young. As it matures, it'll get more robust and problems we experience today will start to go away," O'Shaughnessy says. "For the stage at which the platform is, we're pretty happy with it." "The people behind the Facebook platform are very smart. I'm confident they will take more steps to improve this," iLike's Partovi said. "It's like the Wild West now, but I don't think [the abuses] will last very long." Facebook didn't respond to several requests seeking comment for this story.
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Apple&#39;s iPhone may be big  news, but in Silicon Valley all eyes are on Facebook. The  all-ages private Internet club that began as a college student  hangout has become the tech industry&#39;s hottest ticket.
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Social networking sites like Facebook have wooed millions of users with their easy format for keeping in touch but left them navigating the pitfalls of interacting online -- is it really private?
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A page on the official developers' wiki hints that the social network will be offering data storage space for applications hosted on the Facebook Platform.
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Changes in the way Facebook users are notified of developments in their friends' lives cause an unprecedented backlash on the social networking site -- and force users to reevaluate the nature of social networking communities. By Michael Calore.
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Internet startup Meebo is urging developers to create applications around its Web-based IM (instant-messaging) site, an attempt to create Facebook-like momentum.Using the Meebo site, people can send instant messages using accounts from companies such as Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL. The site lets people use their IM account when they may not be at computers with the right IM software installed. People can also embed a Meebo chat window within their Web site.Meebo has started to augment its site with applications and has recently added voice and video chat. Now it&#39;s hoping to lure developers into building applications that will be offered through Meebo&#39;s site, similar to Facebook.Facebook opened its site to external developers&#160;in May and now has at least 6,000 applications, which have drawn more people to the social-networking site. Sites such as Facebook, MySpace, and others want to generate more advertising revenue by taking advantage of the masses of users flocking to social-networking sites. So far, Meebo has no advertising.Developers can build a JavaScript or Flash application and register it with Meebo, which will then release code to allow the new application to call on Meebo&#39;s APIs (application programming interfaces), according to Meebo&#39;s blog.The application then resides in Meebo&#39;s database. When the developer signs into their account, the application will appear in a list contained within Meebo&#39;s IM window. The developer can invite others to try out the application.Eventually, developers can alert Meebo again to review the application. Meebo says it will then contact the developer within a few weeks.&#160;
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MySpace next week will begin providing APIs to developers looking to create applications to run on the social networking site.
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Bebo has developed a system to let applications written for Facebook run on its social network.
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Facebook wants to make the data its members enter into the social network&#39;s profiles portable, so that they can move that data to other online services if they want, the company&#39;s CEO said Wednesday.That Facebook doesn&#39;t let them do this today is &quot;a flaw in the system&quot; and something the company wants to fix, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco.&quot;It&#39;s the users&#39; data. We want to [make it portable.] That&#39;s the goal,&quot; he said during a keynote speech in which he fielded questions from moderator and conference chair John Battelle and attendees.However, when pressed to provide a timetable for when Facebook might do this, Zuckerberg refrained from making a deadline commitment. &quot;I don&#39;t know,&quot; he said.The massive response from outside developers who have built, to date, about 6,000 applications for Facebook has been &quot;incredibly humbling,&quot; he said.Because&#160;Facebook chose to open up the platform&#160;at an early stage of its development, instead of refining the program internally for several years, the company is learning as it goes along, he said.That is partly the reason why the wording on the terms of service for developers may be read as giving too much power to Facebook over the third-party applications on its platform.However, Zuckerberg said Facebook isn&#39;t interested in &quot;yanking&quot; popular applications so that it can build them itself.While Facebook has to reserve the right to build whatever application it deems core to its social network, it doesn&#39;t plan to trample on its developers and steal their thunder.&quot;It wouldn&#39;t be good for us if we did that,&quot; he said.Opened to external developers in May, the platform is seen by many as containing well-designed tools and offering developers generous revenue opportunities, despite the terms of service language that Battelle highlighted and that has concerned developers who are investing time and money in creating Facebook applications.Still, Facebook has already had to step in and curb the behavior of some applications which, designed with self-promotion features intended to spur their adoption, annoyed users with unsolicited e-mails and intrusive message displays.Zuckerberg said it may take many years for the Facebook platform to reach a level of maturity, and in the meantime, the company will work hard to continually improve and refine it.He remained tight-lipped when asked about rumors that the company is in the latter stages of securing financing from a major Internet company, like Google or Microsoft.&quot;How&#39;s the financing going?&quot; Battelle asked him. &quot;Very well. We&#39;re almost all wrapped up,&quot; Zuckerberg answered, declining further comment.Facebook will likely more than double its staff of 300 to about 700 in the coming year, growth that Zuckerberg acknowledged is intense. Many of the new hires are referred by employees, he said.Asked if Facebook is contemplating hiring an experienced CEO to run the company, as fast-growing startups often do, Zuckerberg said that the focus is on &quot;developing a really good team,&quot; in part because there aren&#39;t many seasoned CEOs experienced in social networking.Zuckerberg also suggested that the company may be developing its own advertising platform, but declined to offer details, keeping mum when asked if the ad platform will syndicate ads outside of the Facebook site, thus becoming a potential competitor to networks from Google, Yahoo and others.Asked about the investigations from some U.S. attorneys general offices into Facebook&#39;s operations and policies regarding objectionable content and the presence of sexual predators among its members, Zuckerberg said the social network gives users very granular control over what data they share, how they share it and with whom.However, he acknowledged that he&#39;s not very familiar with how the company complies with civil and criminal investigation subpoenas.Founded in 2004, Facebook&#39;s popularity has been ballooning for the past year or so. Its user ranks have increased to 47 million active users today from 12 million in December. Over half of its active members return to the site daily.Web 2.0 Summit ends Friday.&#160;
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The influx of business users into Facebook's formerly college-centric community has led to a culture clash for some longtime users, leading them to reconsider how much personal information they share on the site.
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The publicity avalanche surrounding FireFox continues unabated. News.com profiles developers at the forefront of the FireFox developer movement and explains how some crafty developers are taking advantage
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The online advertising firm has launched a new program for serving ads to third-party developer applications on Facebook--but what will Facebook's own advertising announcement next week mean for this sort of strategy?
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Which is a more interesting platform -- Facebook or Firefox? This was a topic of conversation at the Web 2.0 Summit last week in SF, not on stage, but in a LobbyConversation between myself and venture capitalist Bijan Sabet. Bijan Sabet: "I like that Firefox developers don't have to live in a world where they lie awake at night worried that the platform company is going to make life hard for them." What do you think??
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To be, or not to be: Now Facebook users can decide.
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MySpace on Tuesday opened its popular social-networking platform to software developers, echoing a move credited with helping Facebook gain ground on its market-leading rival.
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Blog: Some developers must have too much time on their hands
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Facebook has launched a licensing program to allow other social networks to use its technology.