Facing Down the Facebook Platform
The buzz on Facebook’s “Platform” – an easy way for Facebook users to easily add custom-made-for-Facebook widgets onto Facebook profiles – continues to grow.
Super quick refresher on Facebook for anyone not hip to it: it’s the MySpace of 2007. There, I said it.
I was therefore motivated to take a closer look, add some widgets, and mess around. My first impression was that the entire interface was kind of clunky and, in fact, adding widgets wasn’t as easy as originally advertised. However, I think this is far more Facebook’s issue than the widgets existing within the Platform (plus, I’m becoming more of a functionality snob as time goes on, I find). After a while I got the hang of it and found that choosing and adding widgets was pretty easy. The key is to click “edit” on the right nav bar next to Applications, and then click “Browse more applications” to get to a place where you can find a pretty wide range of widgets, from the useful to the odd and back again.
I can see right away why iLike’s music widget is so popular (and check out how it’s fueling the company’s insane growth overall!). It allows you to add individual music tracks and has a somewhat addictive game called iLike Music Challenge that tests your knowledge of music and bands. The best part about it is that it taunts you by letting you know how many points you need to reach the next rank. (I’m proud to announce that I am now a Music Intern!)
You can also sync up with popular applications such as Flickr, though I found setting up this particular widget to be far less than easy, and I can imagine and hope that going into Flickr itself, grabbing widget code from there directly, and slapping it back into a MySpace or other social networking profile would be an easier and more efficient experience.
Overall though I really like Facebook’s Platform and can see how this addition to Facebook’s clean, straight-forward, and network-centric approach to social networking is shooting Facebook’s popularity through the roof. And if you don’t want to take my word for it, Internet legend Marc Andreesen agrees, writing that “the new Facebook Platform is a dramatic leap forward for the Internet industry…. In a nutshell, the Facebook API enables outside web developers to inject new features and content into the Facebook environment…. Viewed simply, this is a variant on the “embedding” phenomenon that swept MySpace over the last two years, and which Facebook prohibited.”
And AttentionMax pays attention to the fact that Facebook is becoming a central hub that connects all kinds of viral applications that people find useful, such as Twitter.
This is really about making social networking useful to people who might normally not find much reason to set up, say, a MySpace profile.
Recent Entries
- The NFL is taking the Internet seriously
- Hurricane Gustav, political obsessions, and Hulu surfing
- TechCrunch redesigns: over undesigned?
- A personal take on Technorati’s acquisition of Blogcritics
- Imagine an Amazon Kindle with Shelfari-like features
- CNN.com offers embed code for video
- ESPN to live stream baseball, and the Mad Dog moves to Sirius Satellite Radio
- On the interwebs, simpler and smaller equals better
- Top online news destination: MSNBC
- Why would a Fox News SVP call Facebook “the leading social network”?
