Facebook Apps - Unlimited Possibilities

By Steve Poland • July 20, 2007

Alright, besides Fred Wilson — who’s addicted to thinking about the limitless possibilities of these? I should probably start brainstorming — I may sicken you with all my FB ideas, like I did with all my past Twitter idea posts.

Post in the comments if there are any cool Facebook apps you’ve seen — or app dev tutorials, etc. I’m going to be binge reading on all the dev options of F8 to understand the possibilities (do you have a user in your own app and Facebook — or can you just use the Facebook user — iLike seems to do that and not require an iLike account, etc).

Have you seen any cool monetization of these apps? I’m relatively new, but I saw the iLike app is basically Facebook framing the app, which includes an ad being run from ‘fb.ilike.com’.

Who are some of the top developers out there of these apps?

Q: Facebook Apps - How to Sync FB Login with Non-FB Login? I’m trying to figure out — what’s the best way to sync a user that signs up for a Facebook Application via Facebook, so that they can use the application at the non-Facebook website as...
IDEA #73 - Friends Categorized as API to other Facebook Apps Another Facebook application idea comin’ at ya!… Robert Scoble has vocalized how he doesn’t like the restriction Facebook puts on your number of friends (5,000) and that he wants as many people to be his...
IDEA #67 - Desktop/Mobile IM Client for Facebook Facebook Development API allows desktop apps to be created and has a code library for them. I’m surprised no one has created an Instant Messenging application (like AIM, Yahoo! Messenger, MSN Messenger, etc) that uses...
Twitter - Become the (Facebook) Platform, For Mobile I had an idea last week while chatting with Alex Payne, one of the Twitter developers. In the past, I wrote about how Twitter opened up their API for direct messages — which I thought...
IDEA #62 - Reincarnate Yub.com, but on Facebook You may not remember Yub, but Yub could have taken off like MySpace — it was an early Friendster competitor as well. They focused on shopping, MySpace focused on Music — and the Music focus...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Comments

7 Responses to “Facebook Apps - Unlimited Possibilities”

John on July 20th, 2007 7:28 pm (perm link)

check out appsaholic (http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?api_key=c25d4cfceab88f0a098fd50d46467c3c) they have some really neat information like top developers, most viral applications etc, most of the stuff you were just asking about.

The developer docs are still the best place to start looking for development info - to get started at least. There are lots of people actively blogging but it depends on the technology you want to use. PHP is probably a good choice since the PHP library was released by facebook. I’m using the RFacebook gem for Ruby and have had no major problems with it so far. A number of people seem to be developing with rails as well so there are a lot of resources (iLike built their app with rails i believe).

BayPartners also set up a fund specifically for facebook apps that you might want to look into once the ideas start flowing (http://www.baypartners.com/appfactory/).

Hope this helps to get you started
Robert on July 20th, 2007 7:38 pm (perm link)

I too have been thinking of ways to leverage their built in social network. There are already hundreds of little apps out there but none that I have seen that are actual businesses or have any monetization.
Del on July 20th, 2007 9:55 pm (perm link)

personally I stopped using facebook

unfortunately facebook has been myspaced

i really didn’t like the food fight app — I have to pay $1 to throw an apple at my friend when I can do it for free in real life?? ? wtf??
Del on July 20th, 2007 9:56 pm (perm link)

btw I love your blog.. I just wish you posted more often with more entrepreneurial/web2.0/business content
Nathan on July 21st, 2007 1:13 am (perm link)

I’ve seen some interesting monetization thus far. I think my favorite (or most clever) is the guy who created the virtual bookshelf based off of Amazon. They’re all affiliate links.

My biggest question would be what level of access you have to people photo tags.
David Cohen on July 23rd, 2007 12:49 am (perm link)

J Squared Media is a TechStars team with 500k+ users. It’s the #40 app on facebook and growing rapidly. They’re seeing real money from their minimal ads, and blogging about it http://jsquared.wordpress.com/
Dave on July 23rd, 2007 4:14 am (perm link)

i am a huge fan of the travel site couchsurfing.com it would be great to see an f8 app with a similar focus. or an app for roadtripping. u can type in an end location then it will use google maps and your network to spit out everyone in between that u could stay with on the way. for example if i wanna roadtrip from boston to cali, it would be great to see which of my friends are on the way.