One of the things recently talked about in our Facebook class is the news feed. The consensus was that its an Ace in the hole for Facebook. I’m not going to argue with that, but how much is too much? Sure, I’m glad that Facebook gives you the ability to control what shows up where on mini feeds and news feeds, but I am beginning to feel a bit overwhelmed with all this “control.”
One of Facebook’s strengths (atleast in my mind) is the UI. Its clean, simple and attractive. reading the information relativ to your network is easy and the format is great. Now I feel like I have to defend myself from so much information so I can still make out the important stuff.
With the news feed being opened to Apps, and now the feature Project Beacon which includes products your friends have purchased from partner sites in your feed, The clean interface might be a thing of yesteryear.
Could Microsoft be rubbing off on Facebook already? Check this video out to see the a possible evolution of Facebook. Replace “iPod” with “Facebook”
I’m fully aware of all the lame apps around, but creating a good app is a lot of work. My entire team definitely underestimated the amount of time required to develop an app that is useful to users. Our app is aimed at the car enthusiast community, therefore we’ve performed some “field” research to get feedback on what kind of features they would find useful. Obviously, we had our own ideas previous to the research, but the feedback was great. We got a lot of awesome suggestions(along with some entertaining ones). If you are developing an app for a specific community, I highly recommend speaking directly with people who will likely be using your app to get great ideas. Obviously, user comments on the app are effective, but it is definitely a different type of feedback than feedback “in the wild,” or sites where your users congregate en masse.
This year Stanford is offering a class for designing, developing, and implementing Facebook Apps. As far as I know, this is the first class offered on this subject. I’ve decided to take on the other members of my team in this class as authors for this blog. We’ll be posting our experiences and anything that has to do with Facebook Apps related to our experience.