Facebook Platform

Facebook announced the deployment of the Facebook Platform during the f8 conference on May 24, 2007. Facebook initially included 85 applications in the deployment. The platform and its apps became an instant hit. For example, the photo editing application Picnik added 100,000 users in the first 3 days. Meanwhile, hundreds of developers rushed to create Facebook apps for the masses of Facebook users. The most popular apps included iLike, TopFriends, and Graffiti. Users learned about new apps on their News Feeds which published stories when friends added apps. Many applications saw such fast and unexpected growth that their servers died out. Another advantage for developers was that they could place ads on their Facebook application and collect all of the money earned.

While all numbers indicate that the Facebook Platform has been a huge hit, there has also been some criticism. With time, many began to criticize Facebook’s platform for having too many frivolous apps. Some doubted whether it was such a great distribution tool after all. As of October 2007 there were over 6500 applications, but only the top 3 apps, TopFriends, FunWall, and Super Wall have over 1,000,000 active users, and only 58 apps have over 100,000 users. Additionally, 6 of the top 10 are created by Slide and RockYou. Another criticism was that many apps were abusing the platform through tricky spamming methods. Facebook has begun to close up some of these holes. A couple other criticisms of the platform were scalability issues and that developers must use the Facebook Markup Language (FBML) for the front end design, as opposed to the ubiquitous HTML.