Social Applications

[Jonathan]

Has anyone in this group thought about or implemented an application
on a social network, such as myspace or facebook? (or the iphone)?

[George Anderson]

I have built a Facebook application for the company I'm currently
working for and also have worked with the MySpace PHP API as well.
Also played with the Bebo API as well.

[Jonathan]

Was the application for a client or for the company? I've been
thinking about how facebook applications can become more business
oriented. Ecommerce on facebook has been an epic fail as far as I
know. Usually a Facebook business listing, and perhaps integration
through Facebook connect in order to show personalized content, have
been popular...

[George Anderson]

The application that I designed was for the company, but now several
of our clients are using it to generate leads from this application.
The main goal for the application was to integrate their student
portal within Facebook but leverage our current system to send out
emails, track usage, etc...

The way we grab media now is changing rapidly. Most people now expect
to receive content instead of going out to get it. So integrating
with Facebook made sense for us. We want to push information from the
school to potential/current students.

I know that most people that setup applications tend to rely on
advertising for a main source of money. They typically sell them
after they get so many hits and users using the application.

I also used Facebook connect to offer another way of authenticating
the user when accessing the portal outside the Facebook application.

I'm not quite sure how applications can become more business oriented
but I think that depends on what you want to do with your application
and the rules Facebook imposes. We don't sell stuff or advertise
within the application but sell it as a module per say.