Last night about 200 Seattle tech people, mostly developers but a few marketer types as well, hung out for 4 hours with a few of the folks from facebook to learn about their new open Platform. A major takeaway for me was that, if you’re building off an existing application (as we plan to do with RealityAllStarz) you really have to choose between 3 different approaches to building your facebook app:
- On one side, come up with a new idea and build a totally separate application, optimized for facebook, which is distinct from your other application. This would be like a travel site that sells airfare doing a facebook app for rating hotels or best cities to travel to.
- In the middle, take a small piece of your existing application (ideally comprised of features exemplifying its core value) and re-build this in facebook.
- At on the other side of the spectrum, build a really simple “link app” that simply drives traffic to your other site
Much is this is obviated by several restrictions in how you can make applications on faceboook, including
- a 24 hour restriction on how long you can retain demographic data on your users
- no ability to reliably get a users email address or cell phone number
- some limitations on using javascipt with facebook (you can only in an i-frame in the canvas)
- and requiring confirmation clicks when using flash within your facebook app
Dave Morin had some good insights. When I asked what he and some of his fellow facebook employees thought would be a great app, one has built yet one said something for large scale conferences. Which I thought was great because we’re considering doing something with Pathable. They also mentioned that games are few and far between and yet game-type apps are some of the most used.
