Stanford Students Present Facebook Apps to Class
I had a chance to drop in on a session of the class being taught at Stanford this quarter for students who want to learn about developing applications for Facebook (briefly mentioned here). Today’s session was a bit unique since the students were expected to give presentations about the applications they have developed so far.
Of course, the existence of this class is now a bit ironic, since today more news emerged about Google’s OpenSocial, a new alliance that, among other things, allows application creation with basic HTML and JavaScript skills. With Facebook, developers need to learn a new markup language called FBML, thus, part of the need for a class. That said, much of the Stanford class is dedicated to the concepts that are pertinent to application development on any social network platform. For that reason, the class is hardly invalidated – and is perhaps reinforced – by recent developments with OpenSocial.
All in all, I learned about 25 applications for about two and a half minutes each. Most of them were quite simple, as their assignment had been to create applications that drew the largest number of users (their next assignment will be to focus on user engagement). Like Facebook apps in general, the majority of the Stanford apps were also intended for diversionary (dare I say trivial?) activities. That’s not necessarily a knock against them since many – and perhaps most – users obsess with Facebook because it simply amuses them. Plus, it’s impressive that these students were able to put applications together with any decent functionality in the time they were allotted.
Here’s a rundown of the applications created by Stanford students listed in the order they were presented. Links to most of them have been provided since they are actually live on Facebook now, but keep in mind that these are still in development so they may not work completely, or at all for that matter.
Animated Gifts – send your friends animated gifts.
Guess Who – play the classic board game online using your friends as pieces. Click on profile pictures to flip people down.
Car Overload – addition to online car enthusiast community. Add the car that you own and the parts that going along with it. Car parts brought in from online auto sellers. Share parts with friends, comment on parts, and display your car on your profile page.
In addition to the student presentations, Blake Commagere stopped by to give a bit of a lecture about what he’s learned from developing applications for Facebook (you can blame him for being bit by zombies). He stressed that while invitations are currently the key way to attract users to your application, the news feed will become the primary method of spreading virally once Facebook allows applications to display items to people who haven’t yet installed them (currently, you will only see messages from the applications you have installed).
He also discussed how many corporations are banging on the doors of Facebook developers because these companies need engineers who can create an applications for them that build brand awareness. Apparently, these companies are so desperate for talent that they are willing to pay large sums of money and give developers complete ownership of the applications they produce. His overall point was that developers need not currently worry about going out and doing things on their own, because their talents are in short supply.
Finally, he highlighted a few interested aspects of Facebook’s seemingly unsubstantial “poke” feature. He pointed out the importance of the feature’s sexual undertones and argued that poking behavior can actually be tracked to better understand courtship, since is not “binary” (it matters how long people wait to poke others back, etc.).
Blake’s view on OpenSocial: it will exhaust him by providing even more work. He thinks it looks a bit shallower than Facebook’s platform, but he expects it to improve with time. He approves of FBML’s power and thinks platforms that depend on API calls have significant weaknesses.