Today Facebook announced a dramatic shift in strategy in the form of the Facebook Platform. In a sentence, the Facebook Platform will allow anyone (yes, that may mean you) to develop applications that Facebook users can install into their profile. Although rules do exist on how you can use/store profile data, Facebook promises little regulation on what the apps do, even allowing outside companies to capture revenue via their applications. This opens up the 6th most trafficked site in the world to companies and visitors alike to create applications that directly generate revenue from Facebook.
At Terralever, we’ve been actively working on a few applications for the new platform for some time now and we’re participating in the launch event today in CA as a developer partner. The applications that we released along with the platform launch include:
- stuffCLOUD – a interest visualization tool that allows you to compare your intersests to your friends and the Facebook community as a whole. It also includes a nifty visualization tool that shows, real-time as interests are being added/removed across all of Facebook
- FlipBook – a super-simple, visual Flipbook that allows you to take Facebook albums and present them into a Flipbook on your profile page for others to browse.
More to come on this as it progresses, but exciting times are surely ahead.
) that are ready for the launch. Starting tonight (or very early Friday morning) all Facebook users will be able to add these apps to their profiles and developers will be able to access new API information on how to develop and distribute applications of their own.