Facebook Cookbook - Jay Goldman [7]
Deep integration
Two of the most popular Facebook applications are Photos and Videos, both written by internal Facebook developers. Your applications get the same level of integration as these do (known as application parity), and you have basically the same access to Platform.
Mass distribution
Here’s where the network value comes into play. Those of you old enough to remember television commercials from the 1970s may recall an ad campaign for a shampoo called Faberge Organics (with wheat germ oil!), which holds the distinction of being an almost entirely forgotten line of hair products whose marketing strategy has long, long outlasted the product it once promoted. One of their television commercials showed a blonde woman who had presumably just washed her hair with Organics. The voiceover said, “If you tell two friends about Faberge Organics shampoo with wheat germ oil and honey, they’ll tell two friends, and so on... and so on... and so on...”, which was accompanied by a Brady Bunch-esque splitting of the screen into more and more squares of smiling models. Now think of the social graph from Figure 1-2: if Mark does something interesting and Facebook automatically tells two of his friends, they might do the same interesting thing, and two of their friends will find out. Since most people on Facebook have a lot more than just two friends, the network effect does a lot more than just double at every point (if everyone on the site had an average of 10 friends, for example, the message would reach a million people in six generations). It’s safe to say that Facebook offers an opportunity to distribute to a much larger audience much more quickly than virtually any other technology in history.
New opportunity
This brings us to the bottom line: Deep Integration + Mass Distribution = New Opportunity. Building applications on Facebook Platform gives you a chance to get your software in front of 90 million people without having to spend millions on marketing, in an environment that is built to spread it to people who want to use it. The barrier to entry is very low and requires only that you retrain some of your existing web development skills (or learn some basic new ones), all of which you can master with this very book.
You’re probably thinking that this all sounds a little too good to be true, and that if this book were a late-night infomercial, I would be telling you all of this from a sleek speedboat hurtling across my own private lake toward my towering mansion, accompanied by scantily clad models and drinking magnums of champagne. The truth is that champagne gives me nasty headaches, and that, although building apps on the Platform can be very profitable and lead to a satisfying career, it’s not a breezy walk in the park. Like almost everything else in life, you’ll still need an original idea, and you’ll still need to roll up your sleeves and dig into some hard work. The rest of this book will help to make that as easy as possible by telling you how to get set up quickly, providing practical advice on what to build and how to evaluate your idea, working through the technical side of Platform, and showing you some proven marketing techniques for your new application.
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[1] Facebook is a registered trademark of Facebook, Inc.
[2] f8 Keynote Address (http://www.new.facebook.com/f8)
[3] http://www.facebook.com/press/releases.php?p=8084
Skills to Pay the Bills
Now that you know a little about Facebook Platform and the opportunity it represents, you may well be asking yourself what skills you’ll need in order to take advantage of it. Facebook maintains an excellent high-level view of Platform on its Developers site (http://developers.facebook.com), as well as a wiki with the nitty-gritty details of Platform (API calls, FBML tags, FBJS, FQL tables, Platform Policy, etc.) along with user-contributed content (http://wiki.developers.facebook.com), but neither of these really covers the basics.