Well, the cat is out of the bag… I’m at the Facebook Platform announcement and hack-a-thon in San Francisco. Terralever was invited to develop with the platform prior to its release. For the past ten days or so, we’ve been test driving the platform and created a few applications.
Applications? Let me back up. Facebook, previously a ‘closed’ site doing all its own development, has made the switch to being an ‘open’ site with the release of the Facebook Platform. The platform allows developers to leverage the power of the rapidly growing social network combined with application functionality of their own.
The Facebook Platform offers two key pieces which, when combined, make the sky the limit for development. The first piece is set of API’s which exposes various pieces of information from the Facebook network. Processing is handled on the developer’s server, so applications can mingle the information received from the API calls with whatever programming the developer provides. The second piece, a markup language called FBML (yeah, it stands for Facebook markup language) allows some processing to occur, and some information to be viewed, once processed by the Facebook server prior to rendering. You also have HTML available to you, of course, as well as Flash and Silverlight. JavaScript—not so much; there is a (very) limited amount of AJAX that is available, however.
Facebook applications are granted real estate on users’ profile pages, in both the narrow and wide columns, as well as their own “Canvas”—basically an entire page which is framed by the Facebook navigation.
Monetization? You bet. Facebook’s take: $0.00. How? On the canvas page, Facebook is allowing outside applications to place their own advertising. Additionally—and this is the one that really surprised me—you can do commerce transactions without leaving the Facebook site. And, again, Facebook’s take isn’t a dime.
The platform isn’t live to the public yet, but the powers that be are telling us that it will be rolled out to the public tonight. Our applications are called “stuffCLOUD” (a visualization of things that an individual, their friends, and the entire Facebook universe like) and “Flipbook” which is a photo flip-book which leverages albums in the Facebook user’s profile. I’ll blog more about the apps themselves later and how they are received.
This is just the beginning…
Read the Terralever Facebook Platform Press Release.
Tags: Events, Facebook, FBML, Flash, Hack a Thon, Programming, Silverlight, Social Networking, TerraleverYou may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
