This is Not a Brain Surgery

10:48 pm - how to develop a killer facebook application

Facebook applications are the latest trend. Now everybody has to have one. Unfortunately, many people do not understand how to design a good facebook application. The usual approach is to take their web site and squeeze as much as possible of its functionality into facebook application. This is usually a very bad idea.

Let us take as an example FlightStats. They have a pretty good web site with useful tools. They know how to track flights and seems to be doing it well. Now let us look at their facebook application. It is just a scaled down version of a web site.

When you design Facebook application you need to aim to please two audiences. The first is obviously a user who has installed the application. He will see it on his profile page and can use it to access some information or to do something. The second, the most important audience, is his "friends" - people who visit his profile page.

The value of putting every piece of information which user might ever need to his facebook page is dubious. You have to be seriously addicted to Facebook to make it your main window into the world and prefer feature-stripped and scaled-down facebook applications to real web sites, which are just one click away in the very same browser which you are using to access facebook. Call me old-fashioned, but I would rather go to google.com than install and use Google search widget on my face book page. So the first question to ask yourself is: what are the reasons for profile owner to keep your application on his profile page? How it is useful to him or her?

When we are talking about profile owner "friends" we should consider, whenever they are interested to see the application on somebody else profile page. For example, if I am to add Flight Stats application, would my friends be interested to track my mover flying to visit me for Christmas? Thus, the second question one should ask yourself is whenever the facebook application you are developing will be interesting or useful for other people to see on user profile.




By now you can probably figure out how to design good facebook application. Keeping these two audiences in mind and trying to present useful functionality to both of them (which does not have to be the same! The application could look and behave differently depending who is using it - a profile owner or a visitor).

If you are serious about developing not just good but great applications you should find a way to explore unique advantages of the facebook platform. Ask yourself, what it is you can do on facebook which you could not do on your regular web site? Most obvious thing is to explore users social graph. For example, you can try to build features engaging user friends. Take a closer look at the most popular applications out there. They all engage users in this manner: leave a message on somebody's wall, send somebody a virtual gift, take a compatibility test together, challenge your friend to a game or quiz, compare tastes, etc. This gives users a chance to interact with each other and this is what really makes facebook applications viral (the holy grail of all web marketing people nowadays).

Speaking about viral aspect: it feeds on something called netowork effects. To exploit that, you need our application to become even more useful with more users adding it. This way the value of application for each user grows with the number of users who have also added it. Let users help to distribute your application. For example taking a movie quiz and putting results on your page could be interesting. But allowing user to challenge one of his friends to take a movie and compare results makes your application viral.

All of this might sound obvious, but as part of my consulting business, I have to explain these things regularly to customers coming to us for help facebook applications development.