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.

Facebook News Feed

Facebook’s most controversial feature launch was the News Feed, a bulletin on users’ home pages that automatically broadcasts their friends’ most important activities. Days after the feature debuted on September 5, 2006, hundreds of thousands of Facebook users created groups protesting the News Feed because they felt it was displaying their information without permission. Ironically, all information on Facebook was entered manually by users and available for only their friends to see, but many felt there was a certain “stalker” element to the News Feed. As many bloggers began decrying that Facebook’s decision would lead to their demise, news crews camped outside the Facebook offices eager to see what would happen next.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg ultimately wrote a personal letter to all users indicating that Facebook would be adding privacy settings. Since then, News Feed has been an incredible success, with page views skyrocketing since its introduction. The entire fiasco could be viewed as a success, garnering Facebook an incredible amount of press and showing the power of social networks to galvanize support for a cause. Ironically, in this case, the cause was for the removal of a Facebook feature.

Facebook Mobile

Facebook’s Mobile app allows you to use Facebook Chat, and check your latest photos and status updates.
 Facebook helps you connect and share with the people in your life.
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