A little over two weeks ago, Facebook Platform was introduced and third party applications started pouring in. It got quite the attention and buzz around the Internet, yet not a lot was said on Facebook itself. Once users started adding the applications however, they started spreading like wild-fire! If you use Facebook, you’ve had a few weeks to search through the growing list of applications and tinker around with some of them. Any first impressions?
As of today, there are 235 different applications available. Every day when I log-in to my account, there are always a decent amount of my friends who have added applications. It’s gone over a lot better than I had really expected it would, and there are several applications that have turned into instant hits like Top Friends, iLike, Fortune Cookie, and Horoscopes.
While I certainly underestimated how successful this would be, did Facebook underestimate it as well? Caroline McCarthy over at Webware pointed out rumors going around yesterday that Facebook had to sell 10 percent of their share so that they could purchase the servers to handle the increasing load. The rumor stemmed from an article that appeared in The Times (U.K. newspaper) that was later pulled. While that rumor remains exactly that, a rumor, there was something else that gave the indication that Facebook simply wasn’t prepared for the success of the F8 Platform.
The indication came from an add for ViddYou’s F8 application on Facebook. The ad said “Check them out! They loaned us servers to stay up!” ViddYou is a startup out of California focused on video-blogging, and it appears as though Facebook turned to a friend in a time of need for some help. Nothing wrong with that! Facebook got their servers, and ViddYou got some decent exposure to massive amounts of people.
With the growing list (which is nicely categorized by the way) of applications available, do you use any of them? Are there any favorites so far?
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The reason why I preferred Facebook to MySpace was that everyone’s page was the same. They’ve slowly moved away from simplicity and now everyone has tons and tons of apps on their pages. I’ve reduced the amount of time spent on Facebook drastically because of it.
I sorta agree with you Kevin. Part of me is afraid people’s pages will start getting so overloaded with these 3rd party apps that it may soon become the new myspace. However, I am glad that many of my friends aren’t using the “Top Friends” app, I think it’s one of myspace’s worst feature.
Best and most simplistic app out there I think, is “X Me” It brings poking to a whole new level.
I really can’t stand the new apps on Facebook. They had something going for them when they controlled a fair amount of what users could do with their page. It seems now every time I log on that there are a thousand alerts that “desperately need my attention”, which end up being invites to install someone’s application. That’s really the most annoying feature of it all, I really don’t care if my friends install these appliations, if I wanted to install it; I’d find it myself and install it, and if they are going to put it in, make it not the default option to send an invitation to ALL your friends.