FaceBook To Act As Application Host
01/28/2008, 6 months 3 weeks ago
FaceBook has raised the bar for social networks once again in its latest move: allowing FaceBook applications on regular web sites. This mans that FaceBook will be acting as a king of application host, something the no one else is doing right now.
The FaceBooks applications (apps) will be served by a JavaScript client library. The client library will accept calls to the FaceBook API from any website on the internet, bringing the FaceBooks to you. FaceBook apps are the little third party creations that allow you to interact in fun ways with your friends on FaceBook - giving virtual gifts, playing games, asking questions and making quizzes, among other things.
FaceBook apps are also annoying at times, as many of them require you to “spam invite 20 friends” to play. Those are the apps I usually ignore, but if the client server makes FaceBook's Ajax apps able to spam me like that on my own web site, you can bet I won't be participating in what should be a fun online experience. I gt enough of those intrusive invites from friends on FaceBook already.
The only requirement listed by FaceBook's representative is that your web site serve static HTML (if your web site does this, you can use the iFrame tag in your code without problems). Some web sites that rely on dynamic pages mayhave trouble using the applications. It isn't clear yet whether blog owners using PHP blog platforms will have any trouble using the apps or not.
This move is innovative on FaceBook's part, and gives a solid demonstration that FaceBook is going to be a contender in the social networking arena for some time to come. It also was announced at an opportune time, as FaceBook has been catching flak for copyright infringement and some in the tech blogopshere have been questioning whether their value as a company was real or just “on paper”. FaceBook has just solidly placed itself at the front of pack, leaving sites like MySpace to scramble to find their own innovation to help them stay popular.
Uhh… Leslie? How is no-one else doing this? Ever heard of Widgets? Lots of sites provide widgets you can drop into your site (and no, it doesn’t matter if you have static or dynamic pages, as long as your dynamic pages include the same stuff).
Perhaps it is a difference in perception. To my view, a true widget is a passive application that sits on a blog and does one thing - feeds you top posts using RSS, tells you which users have visited your blog, counted down days until the Presidency is over - like that. And the FaceBook apps are not passive, but participatory, which to my view makes them different from a standard widget. But what makes me say FaceBook’s app server is unique is that it is the first time a social network has extended its reach outside of its boundaries to act as a server for third party applications placed elsewhere.
application host,woaaww,it seems really cool
The definition of widget has gone past the Mac Dashboard definition which was just a cool little doohickey that fed you information. I have an article I’m working on for today that details some of the more interesting widgets that are coming out, but no, the Facebook apps aren’t the first interactive widgets to go out the door. Most of the social polling sites have widgets you can use in a sidebar or blog post, and there are several others. CoverItLive has an entire live blogging platform that allows real-time interaction between the blogger and his or her audience.
The real question I have is whether any of the Facebook API-based widgets will be more useful than the Facebook API-based apps. Most of them seem to be more useless junk to spam your friends with.
Here’s another view that I didn’t think of when I first read this either. http://www.circleid.com/posts/81286_facebook_apps_security_nightmare/
I tend to forget that any of these widgets are using Javascript.
Actually the definition of Widget is still a passive doohickey, IMO. Mini Apps are what I consider what you are talking about. It may be semantics, but I think it’s an important distinction.
It’s not how it’s viewed by either developers nor the larger Web 2.0 community however. A widget is any piece of self-contained code that can be moved into or out of another place, such as the Mac Dashboard or a web page, or in Facebook’s case, your profile. Whether or not users can interact with it is dependent on the code base, but has nothing to do with the definition of what a widget is.