Facebook | Application Directory

If you are browsing the Facebook Application Directory today you will find an entry there for The Cotton Club now!  My Facebook Connect application for my blog finally gathered enough activity and users that it was accepted for inclusion in the directory!  This is pretty exciting for me since the application directory doesn’t have a whole lot of entries right now considering the size of the network.  If you are one of my friends on Facebook, be sure to add this application so you can interact w/ me on my blog.  Here’s a direct link to my application.

Facebook | Application Directory

10 Apps on the Facebook API

I was forwarded Adam Ostrow’s post on Mashable today from Joel Kunert & it was worth sharing since some of these applications I hadn’t even heard of before. 

As opposed to the relatively new Digg API, the Facebook API has been available to developers since the summer. With more than 100 applications now featured in the Facebook Developers Product Directory, we decided it was time to cut through the clutter and pick out the ten that we think add the most value to the Facebook experience:

1.) Facebook Toolbar for Firefox – This application extends the Facebook experience to the browser. You receive automatic notifications of friend requests, new messages, and can check what your friends are up to in the “Facebook Friends Sidebar” feature. The toolbar also comes with the “share” link which allows you to quickly import and share any web site with your Facebook friends.

2.) rendezbook – Serving as an anonymous “MeetMe @ HotOrNot” type service, rendezbook lets you identify Facebook friends as someone you a) would like a stronger friendship with b) would like to date or c) would like to have a “random fling” with. Your preferences are anonymous, until of course the person you desire indicates the same feeling. The homepage claims more than 1,700 users so far, with a surprising 200+ matches already. I have left all boxes unchecked in this example:

3.) CampusRank – This site allows you to nominate people in the type of categories you might expect to find in a yearbook – Best Smile, Campus Clown, and even “Metrosexiest.” The service doesn’t appear to have a whole lot of traction yet, but perhaps they’re just waiting to show off users once they have more nominees.

4.) Friend Analyzer – This tool shows you which of your friends are most similar to you in a variety of categories. You can also see what the most popular items are in your network. It appears that I have rather feminine taste in music:

5.) College-Roomies – This service lets you search for other students looking for a roommate at your school. In addition to being able to check out the Facebook profiles of other students in search of housing, there is a cool split screen feature where you can see housing preferences (for example, cleanliness, smoking habits, etc.) that prospective roommates that they have filled out on the College-Roomies site:

6.) Your True Self– This site is built around the premise that “your friends say a lot about you.” It analyzes your friends’ political views, favorite movies, music, television shows, and books to guess at things that you might like. For example, 5 of my friends like Family Guy, so Your True Self indicates that I might like it:

7.) The Friend Match – This service randomly pairs up two of your friends and allows you to rate on a 5 star scale how good of a dating match you think they make. If someone has matched you with someone else, you can see it under “My Matches.” I’m pulling a big goose egg so far.

8.) FbCal.com – The Facebook Birthday Calendar Generator creates an iCalendar (.ics) file with your friends and their birthdays that can be imported into iCal, Sunbird, and Google Calendar. For Outlook users, there is the Facebook Birthday Exporter.

9.) Facebook to Twitter – Facebook and Twitter in the same application? How have these guys not received millions in VC funding already!?  In reality “FT” will save you maybe 37 seconds per year, as you need to point to the fbtwit.com site each time you want to automatically post your Facebook status to Twitter. Additionally, Facebook recently added the ability to update via SMS, so it’s unlikely many Facebook users will care much about updating Twitter with the same status message.

10.) Votetronics – This simple voting application allows you to setup a poll that only your Facebook friends can participate in. It seems like this would be an easy and logical feature for Facebook to add to the main service, as polls and surveys are always popular on social networking sites.

10 Awesome Things Built on the Facebook API

Facebook Application Verification Fee

A hot topic in the Facebook Developer Community right now has to do with the idea that Facebook will soon start charging a $375 application verification fee annually to developers who develop applications for the Facebook platform.  In exchange, the developers applications will be awarded an official facebook stamp of approval badge and priority listing above other applications.  I want to go on record as saying that I am personally in favor of this, I think that it will reduce the number of spammy applications that are out there as well as life the bar in terms of what goes live. 

If a developer has to have his application approved, and he actually has a small investment in the application, it’s more likely that his application will function that much better upon it’s release, not that any existing applications mis-function, but I think that it goes without saying that quality is always a good thing.  I also think that with developers paying a verification fee that they will likely build more useful applications that could potentially yield something that most social networks are missing right now and that is a profit model and a game plan.  One of my biggest complaints all while watching the social landscape grow and grow is that there really isn’t anyone outside of the social network itself that is profiting, and of course the networks don’t profit directly from their vast user base, instead their income comes from the very intelligent, targeted ad solutions that they have running.

Facebook Irks Developers With Application Verification Fee

Posted on: Wednesday, 19 November 2008, 11:24 CST

Facebook’s recently announced plan to charge a fee in order to verify applications built for its social network has many developers up in arms.

In order to verify each application developed for the site, Facebook said it will charge developers $375 annually. The verification fee is optional and is reduced to $175 for students and nonprofits.

Platform program manager Sandra Liu Huang said Tuesday that Facebook opened the Application Verification Program to developers on Monday.

Developers who pay the fee and register their application for Facebook verification will earn a special badge that will put their application in a more prominent place among the 48,000 already available for Facebook users.

The fee will cover costs on Facebook’s end related to reviewing the applications, and it will recur each year along with a fresh application review, Huang said, adding that she expects that several hundred will become verified initially.

Some developers are not thrilled about the new verification concept.

Mike Knoop, 19, who developed an application that lets Facebook users request phone numbers from their friends, is not opposed to paying a fee to participate but doesn’t like the idea of paying each year.

“Because its recurring every 12 months, I think that’s going to shut out a lot of the smaller developers that don’t have the initial capital to invest in Facebook applications,” he said.

Huang said if Facebook eventually finds that the costs of reviewing the applications declines, it would be open to lowering the reverification fee.

“I think that the $375 verification fee can be justified if it were a one-time fee. But recurring every 12 months? This will be the big wedge between those apps which get verified and those which don’t even apply. I’m very curious to see what percentage of apps get verified,” another developer wrote on the official Facebook discussion forum.

Another developer said the verification process would also ass a notion of distrust among users.

“Users already distrust applications on Facebook platform. Now they will distrust unverified applications even more. This seems unfair. My application is already ‘well designed,’ ‘trustworthy’ and ‘meaningful’ to thousands of users. Why should I pay $375 a year just because Facebook allowed so many useless, spammy applications in the first place?”

Meanwhile, rival social network MySpace  in a statement said: “MySpace led the way in creating policies that promote a healthy ecosystem, which includes treating all developers, large or small, equally. We already review every app before it goes live, and the cost is nominal so we have no plans to charge developers.”

Facebook Irks Developers With Application Verification Fee – Technology – redOrbit