With all the talk about Facebook lately, I figured it was time to take a look and create an account. The most interesting thing to me about Facebook is the developer platform that was just announced… I had taken a look at the previous incarnation of the API and that was good, but the latest offering for developers is sweet. There is really deep integration into Facebook. You can build applications that just seamlessly snap right into the Facebook experience, and you immediately get a very engaged audience for your thingie.
This is a really great move by the folks at Facebook and takes a page right out of the MSFT playbook… get a bunch of developers to build apps for your platform/OS and a bunch more users will follow and stay. So, I was going to spend a few hours whipping up a little test application just to see how it all played out. The best way to do this is to build something you want that is currently missing. That is how/why I built smartFeed and TinyTwitter. So, my first task was to figure out what to build. In order for Facebook to have value, you need to have a community, so I started attempting to add friends. And here is where I ran into a major snag. I checked to see if anyone from my High School was on – my school wasn’t even in the dataset yet. Next, I checked my company – only one person… huh? Yep, that was you NickB! Next, my undergraduate University – only 55 people. No way! I graduate from the University of Texas (class of 92 Mechanical Engineering btw) with something like 40 thousand undergrads. How about from my graduate school (University of Colorado - ’01 Computer Science) – the number was a bit bigger at 204 but still didn’t find anyone I knew and all Facebookers seemed to be undergrads. The only other friend that surfaced was my man David Henderson – and he is the most technologically immersed cat I know (he is everywhere on the net) – so no surprise there. Oh, it looks like Stan may be jumping on Facebook too - Stan is really the man, btw!
So, what’s all the fuss about Facebook… am I just too old, has this phenomenon not reached my demographic yet, or am I not hip enoguh. So, after my experiment I was left feeling like a dinosaur and wondering if/when Facebook could be useful to me… I’ll keep an eye on Facebook, just as I did Twitter in the early days cuz the Facebook dev platform kicks ass, the team seems really cool (watched one of their all night code session videos), and the CEO is a rock star!
Peeps, start using Facebook, so I will start using Facebook!
4 comments May 31st, 2007