Facebook Platform is awesome.
Late one night, a couple months ago, my girlfriend and her best friend called me up with an idea for a Facebook application (this was just after the Facebook platform, a way for people to make mini-sites that live within Facebook and are used/shared by people with Facebook accounts). I initially ignored it, as I was busy on my own projects. But then, undeterred, they told my best friend. He called me up, and all of a sudden, I found myself deep in the Facebook API, trying to figure out what the hell was going on.
We opened up our application last week, and invited a few of our friends to join it. Just now, less than a week later, we hit 100 users. I’m not going to say what it is or what it does, you can go on Facebook and check it out yourself.
We anticipated some friction with this, especially among our friends, as this application addresses something that some consider very private. Some of our friends refused to add it because they are afraid that I am going to look into their private data. Hah. We’re going to submit it to the public application directory in the coming days, in the hope that doing that causes our membership to expand exponentially, as it does with other applications. After that, we may look towards some form of sponsorship. This has been a great learning experience, not to mention a good exercise of working with someone else, bug-testing, user-testing, privacy issues, etc. This is the first, and definitely won’t be the last, thing you’ll see out of me.
And they won’t let me join.