Kara! Kara! Kara!
Kara Swisher SSSSSOOOOO nails what is wrong with the application developers who are trying to make money over on Facebook.
The other night I was on a panel at the Graphing Social Patterns conference where I helped judge a bunch of Facebook apps.
With each one I asked myself “would I install this?”
The answer with almost all of them is: no. The sad fact, though, is that most people WILL install the stupider apps.
The winners? Three were great, one was really lame.
The Game, by Robert Fan
Judge-O-Rama by Chris Heald
Visual Bookshelf, by Aaron Battalion
Resume, by Joe Suh
Let’s throw out the lame one, the Game, which is a lewd “Hot or Not” app. The others were pretty interesting, though. The Resume app lets you integrate LinkedIn stuff into your Facebook profile. I’m not a fan of LinkedIn, but this app was well done for those of you who are.
If you read books Visual Bookshelf is an awesome way to share your bookshelf with others. Definitely shows a lot of thought and goes way beyond the stupider types of apps.
I have a long list of apps waiting for me. Some are interesting like file sharing, but most are pretty toyish kinds of apps.
I’m really looking forward to the second wave of apps that really do something interesting with the social network of people I’ve added to my Facebook account.
Another problem that Kara doesn’t touch upon is that a lot of these apps simply don’t scale and break for people with thousands of friends.
Looking forward to seeing if Facebook apps improve at the SNAP Summit in San Francisco on October 26.
Oh, and here’s Steve Broback talking about his Facebook Conference, Web Community Forum, up in Seattle on December 5-6, on a walk recently near my house.
Oh #2: Kyte.tv has a new look. I’m going over there today to talk about the changes that are coming to Kyte.tv over the next few weeks. I’m not sure I like this new look. How about you?
UPDATE: I used my Nikon S51C pocket camera to film this video. But Kyte wouldn’t let me upload the high resolution version (said that it was bigger than 50MB, which it couldn’t accept), so you get the small version which makes the player look lame. I’ll push Kyte to increase the limit so we can do more interesting videos.
[kyte.tv appKey=MarbachViewerEmbedded&uri=channels/6118/61274&embedId=10000581]