By Dave McLain

Facebook presents a valuable opportunity for companies to interactively engage an existing audience rather than having to build one. The internet provides powerful methods of interacting with clients and potential clients, but many compelling applications do not succeed because they are unable to build a critical mass of active users. Several sites like MySpace and Facebook have millions of active users, but the ability to participate has been comparatively limited, using either inline advertisements or setting up representative users to spread information about products or companies.

The introduction of Facebook’s developer program provides access to two extremely valuable resources: screen real estate on Facebook’s site and social data. Facebook users are attracted to the platform and stay with the platform not because of the features that Facebook provides, but because it is where their friends are. Users will hit the same pages over and over again not because the content is spectacular but because it is personal. One of the most appealing features of Facebook applications is getting to be on these pages that users already feel a connection to. The most popular applications are the ones that add to that personal connection and allow users to interact with one another better.

Facebook also allows developers to run queries against their very large database of user information, which greatly increases the ability of applications to provide relevant information about a user’s friends. It also provides the potential to grow rapidly if the application enables users to invite their friends and provides incentive for friends to accept.

For all the good things that Facebook applications provide there are some pronounced drawbacks. The type of interactions that are best enabled by current Facebook applications are trivial, this is perhaps best shown by looking at the top 3 applications as of April 17, 2008 – SuperWall, FunWall and Top Friends. These applications allow users to leave each other publicly visible notes and to rate their friends, popular but not very profitable for the authors. The same thing that makes Facebook applications appealing, their display on Facebook pages, also leaves developers at the mercy of the whims of Facebook itself. In early 2008, Facebook experimented with reducing the size of Facebook profiles resulting in many application’s boxes being not shown unless users clicked on their titles. The change was reversed, but it served as a reminder that application developers are not the ones in control.

The platform provided by Facebook is quite permissive, in that it allows businesses to put almost everything they would want to into a Facebook page, but it must be approached with caution. Applications must provide value to the users first. If applications promote a brand but don’t offer anything to the user, they will languish unused. This balance between value to the user and value to the author needs to tip so far towards the user that the strategy for Facebook needs to be rather different than overall Internet strategy. The medium provides a wealth of opportunity for those savvy enough to capture it, but value can only be derived through a well prepared and well executed strategy that takes into account the very fickle audience that inhabits Facebook.