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Bhopu / Tags /
Last.fm
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Posted On
Aug 24, 2007
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If there's one catchword that associates to about more than "Web 2.0," these days, it's "social networking." A social networking site purely based on creating a very effective almost entirely driven by user content. Facebook is the ultimate success story in this model. It rather works in a more refined way as compared to other social networking sites. It carries a tighter knit community and more efficient and better tools.
This site took off with just a few memberships from Harvard University students and subsequently expanded all over the world. Today Facebook has opened the dorms to the world and has turned into a giant mall.
From the last few months social network has taken off from being just an online equivalent of a college kids to the hottest new development platform on the web. I still remember when Facebook opened up its platform to independent developers in May, it became a hub for startups wanting to be a part of the network's rapidly expanding base of 31 million members.
Not very surprising, people are flocking to Facebook and escaping the orbit of other social networking site. The figures provided by comScore have some new numbers reflecting the changing demographic of the Facebook community.
These changes have occurred because Facebook has made some siginificant changes in its demograhic segments to some degree. They have realized that what appeals to teenagers isn’t the same what will keep the 35+ segment happy, which ofcourse is a biggest user segment.
These changes have occurred because Facebook has made some siginificant changes in its demograhic segments to some degree. They have realized that what appeals to teenagers isn’t the same what will keep the 35+ segment happy, which ofcourse is a biggest user segment.
Companies spot Facebook for more business
We can’t deny that Facebook has seen some staggering growth all these years. With almost more than 30 million users there it is not a rare chance that your colleagues and business contacts are on Facebook already. Facebook creates a more friendly and interactive environment than other social networks like Linkedin and MySpace, this can help users establish closer bonds with their contacts.
A lot of companies have started creating their company profile and a company network that further allows then to invite their business colleagues, and customers to become friends.
Using applications like postings one can posts special offers, news, job openings that appears on the Facebook friends newsfeeds.
Another very interesting application like Marketplace can help contacts detect your items. This is free and could be used promote items for sale on your website or eBay.
A lot of companies have personal blogs now. They can import the same to Facebook and that further appears in the newsfeed of their contacts.
Finally, if you think you missing out on a real business opportunity than you should look into developing an application on Facebook. These help you drive traffic to you website and develop friends. One such example is the Last.fm (social music application on Facebook) that boosted their business through Facebook application. One As mentioned by me previously Lastfm. Is one of the best applications on Facebook and was added by 10,000 users within the first ten hours of the service being live, and 10,000 more in the following three hours. It seems to be increasing by about 100/minute at this point.
Can you develop a Facebook Application?
If you don’t want to miss the action, go ahead and get yourself familiar with the Facebook applications. There are a whole lot of people very apprehensive about creating their own as they dint get any help or traction of the process. Don’t delay and work on it now. Let me explain you how it works.
Facebook application has two major parts, the first is the profile box (the draggable box in your profile page) and the other is the canvas page, which is a kind of a homepage for your application. Your application is hosted somewhere else outside of Facebook. The API just allows you create an interface in Facebook. It's my recommendation that you read this page that will guide you to create the Application.
Also to make things easier for developers, Facebook provides FBML (Facebook Markup Language), a reduced HTML, specific for Facebook elements. Some of them are quite handy, such as a friend finder, and it gives you an immediate look and feel that blend in with the rest of Facebook.
Nevertheless, debugging can be annoying at times. Since you can't set environments, Facebook assumes all apps are production, and therefore will not show errors and stack traces. Therefore, one has to tread softly, or cut and paste back and forth to their tools.
That's right. Tools. Facebook does provide tools to test out your FBML and API calls. But it would be much nicer if it were integrated in a development environment for the application.
All, in all, its not a very difficult process like many developers assume. As an aside, I imagine that the reams of data (anonymous, of course) would be a great boon to social scientists. We might see a revolution in that field, especially if it's combined with decentralized computing concepts.
Future of Facebook
As Facebook currently rules the popular crowd on the Internet, there is no doubt that it will continue for long.
Im looking forward to the coming next 12 months as Facebook will have to face much more competition from other social networking sites. But with some kind of application development they will continue to appeal to many.
A number of employees, future employees, clients and future customers are already on Facebook. The user base of Facebook will surely continue to expand leading to different and more valuable ways of sharing information. Facebook has taken off from just being a teen or college site and has changed the way people interact much in the same way as Google changed the way people find information.
Facebook will continue to bridge the gap and actually will change user behavior in ways that are truly significant and you will have to be in the middle of it establishing value, loyalty, branding, interaction, discovery, sales, etc.
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