After attending the F8 Platform Launch, back in the beginning of the summer, I got inspired to write my own little Facebook app. Being so busy with my day job, I wanted to write the simplest quickest thing possible.
At the same time, I was also starting to plan out my crazy summer activities, and was dying for some way to *show it off* to my friends.
So, one random night, I decided to just go for it. I planned out a quick little app that would let me list my Summer Plans so that I can show it off on my Facebook profile.
About Summer Plans
After about six hours of coding (most of which went toward learning the Facebook platform and finding the documentation for the multiple friend selector) I had my very own Facebook Application called Summer Plans.
I could not have made it any simpler, for each summer plan, you say what you are doing, when you are doing it, and you can list out up to 10 of your friends that you are planning the event with.
The end result is a listing of your summer plans, your friend’s pictures and a simple countdown to each plan.
In fact, I kept it so damn simple (and lazy), I didn’t even include an “Edit” feature.
The true test of the Social Graph
Aside from my self serving goal of showing off my Summer Plans, the one other thing I really wanted to find out was whether the “Social Graph” really is as powerful as it claims to be in spreading a simple web application.
To figure this out, I purposefully left out any and all viral features. This means that your summer plans did not show up in the mini-feed.
It didn’t notify your friends if you included them in your plans, hell it didn’t even send a single email out to anyone.
So, essentially, this was a simple standalone app. And don’t worry, I didn’t cheat. I didn’t blog about it, I didn’t send out massive emails.
The only thing I did was tell five of my friends to kindly install the app, so that Summer Plans officially got listed in the Facebook applications directory.
The Outcome
The outcome was, well, satisfactory.
Without any of the viral features, and even with the lack of an “Edit” function, Summer Plans amassed a whopping 449 users that installed the application and added a Summer Plan. As of this moment, there are 302 active users.
Not bad for an app with ZERO viral features.
More Stats
I’ve also heard some horror stories about small Facebook apps getting released and then spiraling out of control, while racking up bandwidth costs and bringing the whole service down to a halt.
Needless to say, at only 303 users, I had no such problems. But, it was pretty interesting to check out how my server stats were affected by the app being deployed.
I have no idea why the Bandwidth usage actually went DOWN. I think it may be the effect of setting up Akismet on my WordPress install (Note that these stats include hits to this blog, which gets little to no traffic).
Need for Analytics
One thing is for sure, there is a clear need for an analytics package that will help measure the performance of a Facebook app.
Being able to figure out realtime statistics on which user installed the app, didn’t install it, and what went wrong where can be the critical thing missing for building successful Facebook apps.
Although, one could argue that the Graffiti app (which, to me, seems to be the most popular Facebook app) will never need such analytics.
Conclusion
As soon as things settle down, I think I want to give Summer Plans another rev (of course, I’ll have to rename it to Weekend Plans, so that it fits with the season).
I’ll start adding some of the notifications, emails and other such viral aspects that can perhaps drive Summer Plans to rock star levels. And oh yeah, maybe I’ll add that ‘edit’ feature.
