A Whole New Facebook

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.

Forever “Powering Through My Afternoon”

Ok, not really. But it’s a fitting headline for my personal take on Twitter.

At SxSW Twitter was all the rage and panelist after panelist raved about this new Internet darling. Being in an open-minded state for the conference I decided to give it a shot. As you can see, I didn’t get far with it. Just four posts into it, in fact. I fear that for all time I will be forever “Powering through my afternoon”, because I’ll probably never update my Twitter status again.

Since SxSW there’s been a ton of talk amongst my peers, in the press,  and the blogosphere as a whole about this emerging phenomenon. Some say it’s the greatest invention since Tivo, other’s don’t get it. I’m placing my flag firmly in the “Don’t Get It” camp. I understand the cool factor of creating “micro-blog” entries from a phone, IM or a website… I just don’t find the need to update the world on happenings in my life. In fact, short of a few close members of my personal life I don’t want just anyone knowing what I’m up to at any given moment. It’s none of their business as far I’m concerned. And honestly, I can’t imagine anyone I know that would really care enough to regularly check my Twitter site to see what I’m doing.