akrish

During this break, I’ve had a pretty hard to keeping myself occupied. I’ve been playing a lot of music and hanging out with my friends a lot, but I haven’t really been in touch with my nerdy programming self apart from this company that I’m working on. At the same time, my brother has been talking about this whole “viral” movement and we’ve been discussing strategies to get your product out to tons of users with minimal effort. One of the obvious solutions is to make a Facebook application which is immediately available to the however-many-million users there are on Facebook and is also easily spreadable via the invitation process. I decided that I too would jump on this all-too-techie bandwagon and make myself a Facebook application.

Over the summer, I was very against the whole Facebook platform movement (you can read about it here) and I’m still not really happy with a lot of things that I’ve heard about Facebook, but I made this app more for entertainment than for anything else. I’m also not very good at using client libraries and api’s and whatnot (I’m really impatient and don’t like to read things) so I figured this would give some practice at working with an api that I definitely needed for the success of my app.

I’ll cut to the chase. You should add this application. Now you may ask: what exactly is it? Well, it’s called Rumor Mill and essentially it’s a way for you to make up, or publicize rumors about your friends. It’ll also keep you up to date with all the latest rumors (real or not) about your friends and let you determine if the rumor is true or not. Once you make this judgment, it’ll show you what other people thought about the rumor. So, why should you add it? Well first of all, what’s the harm? It’s very unobtrusive; it takes no space on your profile page and it remains dormant until someone makes up a rumor about you, when you’ll get a mini-feed notification about aforementioned rumor. Secondly, it’s fun; who doesn’t enjoy make up random stories about your friends and seeing what other people think about them? I think that there’s tons of potential in this application and hope to see the subscriptions skyrocket in the near future.

In reality, I didn’t spend that much time making the application (Sunday and Monday) and I don’t really plan to spend much more fixing it or doing any other Facebook development. I kind of wanted to see what all the commotion about Facebook development was about. I thought I could see how popular it gets (you should add it! and use it!). I also want to switch hosting companies and this other company has a discount (it’s free) if you’re hosting a facebook app on your server.

Anyway that’s my little bit of publicity, add the Rumor Mill!

Everyone knows about Facebook. It’s a great social utility, and probably the most popular online social networking site out there. Almost all college-going students in the United States have accounts, and the craze is spreading to high schoolers, and even to adults (although slowly). Yet, the company may not have such a promising future. Ever since the opening of the so-called “Facebook Platform” to third party developers, the site has severely deteriorated and unless some changes are made, Facebook may start losing out to competing social networking sites.

“Facebook Platform” is essentially an API along with a way for developers to embed and integrate their applications into Facebook. It sounds great in theory; it allows other developers to capitalize on Facebook’s massive user base and it adds value to Facebook itself, by adding more cool features for their users. Unfortunately, it isn’t that simple. Now, the site runs incredibly slowly, and many of the pages are too cluttered with third-party garbage for me to find what I’m looking for. It seems like Facebook would have been much better off without opening their website to other developers and instead just adding some more features of their own.

The thing that made Facebook so cool was its ease of use, but they seem to have lost some of that appeal. Nowadays, when I visit my friend’s profile pages to write something on their wall, it takes at least 15 seconds to fully load their page. The problem is that when I load someones page, I have to gather data from all of these different servers hosting the different applications, and this really slows things down. After that, I still have to scroll past all of their applications to get to their wall wasting even more of my time. Compare this to before, when people’s profile pages loaded almost instantaneously and weren’t filled with applications, and the old Facebook seems to be a lot better, at least in the “ease of use” sense. Ultimately, these two problems caused by the “Facebook Platform” are really taking away from the user experience on the site.

Although I don’t use any of the third-party apps, some of them are pretty cool I and can see why people like to have them. However, this doesn’t mean Facebook should compromise their performance just to allow them. I think they should have kept the site closed to external developers and just developed some of the cool apps internally. First off, this would really improve page load times because all apps would be requesting data from Facebook’s servers. Secondly, this would remove a lot of the garbage on pages because apps could be combined or better integrated. Since Facebook has more control than third-party developers, they are able to combine applications and present them a lot better than external developers can. Another option would be to have a thorough screening process of third-party applications. They can then restrict apps that take away from overall presentation of pages. Either approach probably would have worked better for Facebook in the long run, but the current “open” attitude doesn’t seem like it’ll work out.

I have a Facebook account, but have been using it less and less since the “opening.” I know there are other users that are annoyed with the latency and the ridiculously cluttered pages, but most people continue to use it. Maybe Facebook has such a monopoly on college student networking tools that it doesn’t really matter how bad the site is right now, but sooner or later someone is gonna design a networking site that looks a lot more like the old Facebook and I think they’ll beat out Facebook in the long run. It may end up being a trend with social networking utilities to be really good early on, but they slowly deteriorate after they’ve won over a large user base. It happened with myspace (which is now pretty terrible by the way) and it looks like it’s happening with Facebook.

Edited: August 12, 2007: Marc Andreessen wrote an article about the Facebook Platform soon after the platform was release. His opinion slightly differs from mine but he does mention the latency issues. Read it here.