Mark Evans

Facebook’s Booming App Ecosystem

If you were at all interested in developing an application for the Facebook platform, Toronto was the place to be as nearly 500 people jammed themselves into a downtown conference centre for Facebook Camp, which featured a presentation by Facebook’s Meagan Marks.

By all accounts, it was a geek-fest as well as a fertile job fair for anyone who demonstrated a knack for creating interesting Facebook applications. According to the Toronto Star, Greg Thomson, who developed the popular My Aquarium application, was approached by four different companies looking to hire him.

It is a fascinating phenomena. I mean, it’s one thing for an online service to become extremely popular but another for a developer ecosystem to literally explode overnight. From discussions with several online executives recently, it’s become a strategic necessity to have a Facebook application. As a result, they’re scrambling to come up with something so they can say “Sure, we have a Facebook app”.

The question is whether all this energy and effort is really worth it. At the end of the day, how many of these Facebook applications are going to be anything more than vanity projects? How many of them will attract any users? Of course, it may be that having a Facebook application has become part of doing business for many Web companies - much they need to have a corporate Web site and customer service.

Still, the Facebook phenomena never ceases to amaze. As much as I personally believe this obsession with Facebook is nearing its zenith, the reality is there still appears to be plenty of momentum from a number of different constituencies.

By the way, the three most popular Facebook application according to AppRate is I’m Hungry (which lets you tell other people what you’re hankering to eat), Dogbook and Catbook, which let you create profiles for your dog and cat respectively.

You can check out photos of Facebook Camp Toronto on Flickr. Anyone interested in developing a Facebook application should check out softwaredeveloper.com, which offers up 29 essential tools and tutorials.

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