Facebook Apps Could Be Useful
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I have gotten interested in Facebook apps over the last month and I have started writing one in my spare time (so its coming along very slowly as you could imagine). I have found that they are an excellent way of getting information out to a large audience, as long s you have something that people are interested in that is 
and that’s one of the big problems at the moment. I find that all the apps out at the moment are pretty S**T and useless (bar a few of course) and that means there is really an opportunity to get some apps out that are actually useful. There are also advertising companies that are now offering inventory for facebook developers to monitize their creations. Its also a useful way of advertising your own web applications by offering widgets that link into the main application. After all, why wouldn’t you want to advertise to an audience of 50 million? It would be crazy not to.
So I can never say if I will get time to finish the app as I am very busy with Digaset at the moment, but I would like to complete one just for the experience if anything else. Plus we have mentioned creating a social app for a Digaset offshoot in the future so the experience will come in useful. Keep reading as I may be asking you for some advice in the near future about some features that might be useful and that you might use yourself.
You’re right about apps being a useful promotional tool. At taptu we wrote one to get people interested in our mobile search – you can see it here: http://apps.facebook.com/music-wall/ . It seems to be doing quite well, as it has over 100,000 installs.
What we learned was that although we wanted it to grow virally, we had to kick-start it using advertising to get a large enough number of people interested in the first place.
Also, people don’t tend to use apps a lot. I’m not sure if that’s just ours, as once you’ve placed your 5 favourite songs there’s not much else to do, but I think that most apps are things people just install cos they look fun then forget about.
Yeah you are spot on Carl, and I may have to do a little advertising myself if I am ever to finish one
I also think that people seem, to forget about apps because they are useless in most cases. The zombie ones are just damn right annoying but there are some useful ones out there like the taptu one, even though as you say once you list the songs there isn’t much else to do. But at the same time the app is a way of advertising taptu and it has managed to do it for over a 100k people which is very good. It would also be interesting to release one just to see how far it goes, because its not often that you have access to an immediate user base of millions when writing your own web apps:)
In fact, have you thought about turning the list into a facebook app? It does have that little bit of entertainment factor that people are looking for on facebook.
Another thing about the apps is that the more you have on your profile, the longer it takes to open. Some people have so many of the damn things that I don’t even bother checking their profile anymore!
But if a certain app appeals to someone and they don’t have that many on them, then by all means they work. As mentioned by Carl, it worked for Taptu.