Facebook Dev Garage in Philadelphia
Yesterday I made the trip to Philly for a Facebook Developer Garage. There was an array of people, from developers, to job recruiters looking to hire, to your average bunch of tech-groupies. It was fun. Something I heard over and over was: “we can’t find enough people to develop Facebook applications for us.” And there I was, leaving the meetup with a pile of business cards in my pocket and some new ideas for future projects.
The event consisted of an hour of networking, followed by a thorough presentation by Dave Fetterman, the creator and lead engineer of the Facebook Platform. I came away from the event with three topics that stuck in my mind:
Privacy
As discussed in the most recent Digital Campus podcast, privacy is an ongoing concern with Facebook as they continue to “open up” to developers and advertisers. While much of what I’e been hearing and reading has been critical of Facebook’s lack of privacy settings and difficulty changing them, Facebook itself is confident (or at least projecting a display of confidence) about their own privacy. In fact, Dave Fetterman went on to say that privacy and the way Facebook has developed it within their social utility is why users continue to trust Facebook.
One thing that was mentioned by Dave in his presentation was a lack of privacy settings in many applications that are being developed by 3rd parties. He encouraged us to create privacy settings in order to achieve similar “trust” from Facebook users. Later in the presentation he also discussed how apps rise to the top in popularity based upon how they meet needs of the users, which, if he is right in his impulses, indicates a lack of concern of privacy by most Facebook users. I’d generally agree. The unanswered question remains, who should be dealing with the security and privacy of users - Facebook, or the 3rd party developers?
OpenSocial
I was waiting to see how Facebook would officially handle the launching of Google’s OpenSocial, and at the Garage they played it off well. Dave Fetterman said he was “flattered” by it, after they adopted many of the ideas he included in the Facebook Platform when he launched the API 14 months ago. Rather than looking at OpenSocial as the future of social networking, Dave reframed the discussion to be about Facebook and how they’re the innovators; Google and everyone else is following. When asked if they would adopt OpenSocial, Dave said that Facebook would leave that up to the users, and if they wanted it. That’s the biggest non-answer of the night, repeated over and over.
Providing User Data to Developers
Facebook has been testing a new service for developers to store 3rd Party application data locally on their servers. So what, you might ask? When you take into account Facebook’s recent changes to their advertising service, it becomes clearer. By storing your app’ data on Facebook’s server, their advertising model becomes stronger. For the application developer, they now have resolved many of the scalability problems and time-out failures that Facebook popular applications.
A developer asked if Facebook would allow 3rd party applications access to user contact information, or set cookies to target advertising within their individual apps; I was a little surprised by their answer. Facebook is currently looking at ways to provide applications developers with user demographic data, and also allow them to set or retrieve cookies. Allowing applications to plant cookies seems to fly in the face of many of the privacy issues that were mentioned earlier, but Dave asserted that it was a reasonable request.
Posted in Facebook Platform, Programming
I'm a digital humanist and graduate of American Studies, currently working as a web developer and