Facebook Apps - Unlimited Possibilities
By Steve Poland • July 20, 2007
Alright, besides Fred Wilson — who’s addicted to thinking about the limitless possibilities of these? I should probably start brainstorming — I may sicken you with all my FB ideas, like I did with all my past Twitter idea posts.
Post in the comments if there are any cool Facebook apps you’ve seen — or app dev tutorials, etc. I’m going to be binge reading on all the dev options of F8 to understand the possibilities (do you have a user in your own app and Facebook — or can you just use the Facebook user — iLike seems to do that and not require an iLike account, etc).
Have you seen any cool monetization of these apps? I’m relatively new, but I saw the iLike app is basically Facebook framing the app, which includes an ad being run from ‘fb.ilike.com’.
Who are some of the top developers out there of these apps?
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7 Responses to “Facebook Apps - Unlimited Possibilities”
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check out appsaholic (http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?api_key=c25d4cfceab88f0a098fd50d46467c3c) they have some really neat information like top developers, most viral applications etc, most of the stuff you were just asking about.
The developer docs are still the best place to start looking for development info - to get started at least. There are lots of people actively blogging but it depends on the technology you want to use. PHP is probably a good choice since the PHP library was released by facebook. I’m using the RFacebook gem for Ruby and have had no major problems with it so far. A number of people seem to be developing with rails as well so there are a lot of resources (iLike built their app with rails i believe).
BayPartners also set up a fund specifically for facebook apps that you might want to look into once the ideas start flowing (http://www.baypartners.com/appfactory/).
Hope this helps to get you started
I too have been thinking of ways to leverage their built in social network. There are already hundreds of little apps out there but none that I have seen that are actual businesses or have any monetization.
personally I stopped using facebook
unfortunately facebook has been myspaced
i really didn’t like the food fight app — I have to pay $1 to throw an apple at my friend when I can do it for free in real life?? ? wtf??
btw I love your blog.. I just wish you posted more often with more entrepreneurial/web2.0/business content
I’ve seen some interesting monetization thus far. I think my favorite (or most clever) is the guy who created the virtual bookshelf based off of Amazon. They’re all affiliate links.
My biggest question would be what level of access you have to people photo tags.
J Squared Media is a TechStars team with 500k+ users. It’s the #40 app on facebook and growing rapidly. They’re seeing real money from their minimal ads, and blogging about it ...
i am a huge fan of the travel site couchsurfing.com it would be great to see an f8 app with a similar focus. or an app for roadtripping. u can type in an end location then it will use google maps and your network to spit out everyone in between that u could stay with on the way. for example if i wanna roadtrip from boston to cali, it would be great to see which of my friends are on the way.