Shanti’s Dispatches

Been playing with the new Facebook Developers platform. After a bit of a rocky start due to programmer tiredness (dang missing semi-colon), the rest of development has been a breeze.

The PHP5 “Hello World” walkthrough was a delight to setup, working just as expected. Next came an attempt at building a “hello world” Facebook App on Rails. The docs for Facebook/RoR are a little rough around the edges, but everything is pretty much in place if you don’t make any stupid mistakes!

Now I’m working my way through FBML. There are a few quirks you have to watch out for.

The Zuckerberg presentation at f8 really put in perspective how big of an opportunity this really is for people building apps on the web.

Here’s just one mind-boggling statistic from the presentation: the Facebook photos app alone has more users than all of the web’s photo-sharing sites combined.

Even if these numbers are fudged slightly in Facebook’s favor (who knows?) it’s still one-helluva stat. Facebook has already become a bonafied ecosystem, with some apps reaching 500,000+ users in just a few short months (try that on the real wild web!).

The key is virality. I bet within a few short months agencies and a whole micro (then macro) industry will flourish around this new platform.

2004

“Hi, I’m John. Your new IT Consultant from Accenture.”

2010

“HI, I’m Skylar. Your new Facebook Consultant from KPMG.”

You can bookmark this, digg this or check the cosmos