Facebook Apps Are Pointless If They Don’t Work

Surj Patel is discussing an important issue about Facebook applications over at The Future of Software.

Facebook applications deal with the same, if not greater, scalability issues as regular websites. As usage of any online service grows, developers must provide enough storage and computational power to keep up with the demand. Otherwise, pages take forever to load, error messages begin popping up, and frustrated users vow to never use your product again.

Scalability problems have plagued Facebook’s developer platform from the start. I can’t tell you how many times I have tried to test a Facebook app only to wait impatiently and finally succumb to screens like the one below:

There seem to be two primary reasons why Facebook apps have a particularly bad time with scalability. First, Facebook’s news feed serves as a powerful distribution network that can cause applications to spread virally between friends at a rapid pace. The hockey stick can come very quickly and very unexpectedly for Facebook developers. As a consequence, many of them are caught off-guard and left dealing with victims of their own success.

While I don’t have any statistics on how many Facebook developers are amateur rather than professional, it also seems as though many casual programmers produce Facebook apps that they never seriously intend to scale successfully. The Facebook development environment is such that a skilled programmer can build an attractive application within a very short time. Such casual programming sets these applications up for failure when they receive serious attention by users. Unfortunately, many users (including myself) are left with a bad impression of Facebook apps in general when casually-built apps fail them.

So what is to be done? Patel mentions Amazon’s EC2 and S3 services as good processing and storage solutions for developers who need extra resources on demand and perhaps cannot afford to pay for excessively-sized hosted or in-house scaling solutions. He also names WeoCeo and RightScale as other “meta services” that make it easier for developers to hook up their applications to resource providers.

And yet, it seems unnecessarily inefficient to me that developers have to work with both Facebook and a 3rd-party meta service to deploy successful applications. I’d like to see Facebook itself step in and fill this need for developers so they don’t have to scrounge around for extra computational and storage capacity (after all, there is a waiting list for Amazon’s services now).

If Facebook were able to ensure the success of applications on its platform by providing all the requisite resources for a marginal fee, we would have a win-win situation on our hands. Developers could sleep more easily and so would the execs over at Facebook, because the company wouldn’t have to worry about slow 3rd-party applications tarnishing the brand and overall social networking experience. The service might also provide a healthy revenue stream for the company.

Such a move would take the idea of a platform to another level and demonstrate to potential developers that they really do care about the success of applications within its garden.

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Dapper to Launch Instant Facebook AppMaker

This Tuesday, Israel-based Dapper will launch the private beta of Facebook AppMaker, a new tool that the company claims will provide people with a dead simple way to create new Facebook applications.

At its core, Dapper allows users to create API’s called “Dapps” by selecting data from Websites, RSS/XML feeds, Google Gadgets, and more. Each “Dapp” is an XML which can be manipulated in any number of ways. The company released a tool to create Netvibes modules in late 2006.

Dapper’s Facebook AppMaker lets these Dapps be transformed into full-blown Facebook applications. This includes functionalities such as remote search and retrieval, remote login, and multi-page apps. A Facebook Developer account is a prerequisite to the AppMaker process itself.

The test app I created was an effortless process: I created a Dapp, entered it in the AppMaker wizard, entered the appropriate Facebook’s API/Secret keys, saved and installed. While creating a Dapp was not a sophisticated process on Dapper’s side, it certainly could be more intuitive. I found the Facebook side of the process to require a higher degree of technological aptitude.

Dapper is debuting the AppMaker with an Answers.com application that features three applets: Word of the Day, Today in History, and Do You Have the Answers? Another already available app is Go2Web20’s. Expect an additional application to be launched in the next couple of days with a “high-profile” media player.

Headed by Eran Shir (CEO) and Jon Aizen (CTO), Dapper employs a team of 15 and is in the midst of setting-up an office in San Francisco. In 2006, the company secured a $1.2M funding round from Accel Partners. The company first launched in August 2006 and we covered them as part of a roundup post along with Yahoo Pipes, Teqlo, Proto and OpenKapow in March 2007.

Sign-up for beta access by emailing techcrunch@dapper.net.

TripAdvisor Acquires Facebook App Where I’ve Been For $3 Million

We have now confirmed that this deal has not happened and is in the discussion stage only. Inside Facebook pulled the trigger on their post a little too soon.

TripAdvisor has acquired Facebook Application “Where I’ve Been” for a reported $3 million.

Where I’ve Been allows users to share where they have been in the world from their Facebook profiles and has approximately 2.3 million users.

Inside Facebook notes that the $3 million purchase price values Where I’ve Been users at around $1.30 each.

The purchase is the first major seven figure acquisition for a dedicated Facebook only application. Where I’ve Been was recently included on the TechCrunch interns list of favorite Facebook apps.

Wiki Jacking

Following the decision in January by Wikipedia to strip SEO benefits from outgoing links by adding the link-nofollow tag (see our coverage of how the rule doesn’t apply to certain third party wiki links) the once rampant gaming of Wikipedia has all but disappeared. SEOMoz’s Rand Fishkin posted during the week on a new technique being used that instead of building Google juice to a particular site, aims to knock others off the top positions on Google by promoting the position of Wikipedia pages to the top of each specific Google search query. I’m not quite sure exactly what color hat the method may be (and Rand asks the same question), but it is clever.

Google Removes Blog Showing Leaked Facebook Code

FacebookSecrets, the blog that posted the accidentally released source code for the Facebook main index page, has been taken down. The blog was hosted on the Google-owned Blogger blog network and was removed pursuant to a DMCA take down notice from Facebook.

A new blog (also on Blogger) has gone up that chronicles the back and forth between Google and the author (well, it’s one way communication, actually).

Facebook’s statement on the matter came down to “it offers no useful insight into the inner workings of Facebook” and “the reprinting of this code violates several laws.” We disagreed on both points - the leak provided information to potential hackers as to potential security holes, and the fact that Facebook accidentally released the code themselves on their site may have made it very difficult for them to claim protection under the law.

That being said, it’s unlikely the anonymous author of the blog would be around to defend his/her position. I’m surprised this didn’t happen sooner.

The King Is Long Gone But His Brand Has A Life of Its Own

By Melinda Newman Thursday marks the 30th anniversary of Elvis Presley's death, but in many ways the keepers of his estate are only starting to take care of business.
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Perseid meteor shower reaches peak across Japan

ZAO, Miyagi -- The Perseid meteor shower reached its peak across Japan on early Monday to the delight of stargazers. Officials at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan say that the Perseid meteor shower annually reaches a peak around Aug.
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More Lawsuit Fun For Facebook

Facebook is going to have to defend itself against at least one more lawsuit in the coming months. They’re not just dealing with the ConnectU lawsuit - another one was filed against them last month, in Pennsylvania.

The lawsuit hinges on U.S. Patent 6,519,629 (”System for creating a community for users with common interests to interact in”), which was issued in 2003 and is now owned by the plaintiffs, Cross Atlantic Capital Partners.

This is a flat out patent infringement accusation, and the plaintiff is requesting royalties from Facebook. The patent claims relate to social networks built around communities of users with “common interests.” Facebook, which bases networks around universities, business, etc., is naturally the largest target for the patent offensive.

I emailed Facebook earlier today for a comment. No word back from them yet.