Facebook Development Platform

On June 1 Facebook launched a development platform. Basically they're providing an unprecedented level of access to their social network for anyone who wants to develop software that benefits from their network of 25 million users.

Main site for developing facebook applications
http://developers.facebook.com/

Link to a rather long, but good video that presents the platform. Worth watching at least part of it to get an idea:
http://developers.facebook.com/videos.php

The "causes" application already has 1 million users.
http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=2318966938

Facebook is growing at 300% a year (whereas MySpace is slowing down) and has a growing majority of users who aren't students. It's possible that this new flexibility will make Facebook the number one social network.

Facebook currently suffers from several problems. For instance, the way it displays a list of people is horrible. The page sets are poorly implemented. They show ten users on a page and then REPEAT the bottom two users at the top of the next page. This makes pagination very slow. They do not have any method of sorting results. I think the system used by Campus Activism is much better (alphabetic sorting, jump to a letter, pagination). Twenty is a much better number of items to show per page than ten (I suspect power-users tend to have higher numbers, for instance, I have my Google search results set to 100).

Facebook lacks a powerful and well-written search. MySpace has the best one.

By contrast Facebook has several good features. The ability to drag and drop items to layout your profile is great. It is generally more clean than MySpace profiles - making it much more usable.

There are already over 800 Facebook applications. I suspect the race is on and people will write thousands of them. The downside of this is that if many applications start publishing things in your feeds (notes or other feeds), people are going to get overwhelmed. The simple outlets that Facebook has for distributing information will not be able to cope with the output. Ultimately people will defriend people who are pushing too much content, and perhaps one day someone will figure out a good filtering system for content. For instance, you should be able to have event invitations will only go out to your friends who live within 20 miles.

Activism Network and Facebook
I'm considering whether to completely port Activism Network to run as a client on Facebook, or whether to experiment with porting parts of it.

If I just chose to do a part of it I could implement
-personalized events calendar (based on your zip code)
-new people in your area
-new groups in your area
-new resources
-search box - for people, groups, or resources. (I could do other searches, but these are the most useful).

If I did the entire client, with a lot of hard work I could probably get all of the Activism Network functionality to work on a Facebook page. Thus you could add/edit/delete/browse/search for things using webservices provided by the Activism Network server.

The main advantage of porting Activism Network to Facebook is that it might reach an audience that is 10 to 1000 times larger than the existing user base. The downside is that it might take one year.