Thursday, July 10, 2008 Toral: Developing applications in social networks By Janette Toral Digital Filipino
SHELLY D. Farnham released an O’Reilly Radar Report titled, “The Facebook Application Ecosystem,” last March 2008. It looked into various Facebook applications, analyzed which ones thrive and discussed factors influencing such development.
Farnham noted that applications with notification, invitation and discussion features were the ones that thrive. This is usually found in applications that further enhances communication with users, comparison of friends, social games (where friends go against each other in a game), selection and ranking of friends, profile enhancement and gift-giving, among others.
While this may be true at the time of writing of such report, I’m taking the position that these applications and their features may no longer be replicable in new applications. By this time, social network members have experienced fatigue on application invites and installation notification, among others.
As entrepreneurs and developers want to deploy applications in social network, copying how others have done it may no longer be the solution that will work for us. The following has to be clear:
1. What do you want to end up with? This can be a combination of purposes from a database of users, generating revenue and testing application popularity, among others.
2. Analyze the existing situation. Look at all directions and analyze the existing situation. Equally important is asking the right questions, as well as gauging perception and feelings of your prospects. Otherwise, your application—no matter how good—may not click because of user’s perception and feelings that all social network-based applications are spam in nature.
3.Explore possibilities. There is definitely more than one-way to get to the desired result done.
4.Come up with a single final choice.
5. Get it done. As famous author Edward de Bono puts it, thinking and action goes hand-in-hand. A person who thought of
the solution must also see how that will be put into action and make it happen.
The five items make up a simple outline from Edward De Bono’s book, “Teach Yourself to Think.” I believe that we can harness the power of social networks and take it to greater heights if creators will constantly challenge traditional thinking and delivery.
