Facebook is a rapidly growing opportunity for application development and marketing, allowing you to easily distribute applications or information to millions of users nearly overnight. Because of its origins as a college socializing site, as well as the small size of many Facebook applications, Facebook can be incorrectly dismissed as a novelty rather than a viable channel for driving business results. However, smart businesses have been able to tap into the value of Facebook’s social graph — the network Facebook maintains of the relationships between its users — to grow their presence, products, and profits with overwhelming results.

Facebook’s largest growing demographic is those 25 years and older and over half of Facebook users return to the site each day, providing unparalleled distribution potential for your application and the opportunity to reach millions worldwide. The following statistics demonstrate Facebook’s size and scope:

• Over 70 million active users
• 200,000 new users registering each day
• Number of active users more than doubled over the last six months
• Number 1 photo sharing website amd 6th most trafficked website in the world
• Over 20,000 applications have been built on Facebook Platform and approximately 140 new applications are added per day
• More than 95% of Facebook members have used at least one application built on Facebook Platform

Facebook applications are relatively simple to develop and straightforward to use. Because of Facebook’s level of user engagement, Facebook applications are a cost effective and easy way to reach a wide audience and deliver results related to common business initiatives. For example, your Facebook application may be used to do any or all of the following:

Increase Brand Awareness - Facebook is a great resource for building relationships with your consumers and prospects and can be a useful tool to gauging market awareness, reputation and customer satisfaction. It can also help drive traffic to your web site and increase your organic search rankings.

Generate Leads - Facebook can help customers find you and your services or product offerings. It provides another opportunity to engage and interact with existing and potential clients and customers while building a loyal user base.

Create New Revenue Channels – Facebook provides a quick and effective way to reach new audiences and create new revenue opportunities. Applications can potentially reach millions of users, providing unlimited possibilities to create new products and services.

Making Things Measurable: A Facebook Smashing Success

One of Facebook’s earliest successes was the popular music site, iLike. iLike is a testimony to the effectiveness of Facebook as a platform and its ability to reach new audiences and grow market share.

Before entering the Facebook arena, iLike was a standalone website that had accumulated 18,000 users over 4 months. Here are the dramatic results of iLike’s Facebook application

• +20 hrs – 46,000 new users
• +48 hrs – 180,000 new users
• +7 days – 1.1 million total users
• +7 weeks – 4.5 MM users

As quoted by Anthony Bruno of Reuters, on July 2, 2007, iLike CEO Ali Partvi stated (www.reuters.com/article/internetNews/idUSN0130660020070702):

“iLike is actually better on Facebook than as a stand-alone application. It’s a little sad to have to admit that your own Web site isn’t as good as the thing you build for Facebook, (but) there’s a community already there. That’s impossible to re-create on your own. Facebook has completely redefined what’s possible for a third party co-existing in a social networking environment.”

Currently iLike is listed as at #8 in number of Facebook installs with a valuation close to 35 million dollars. Want more validation and actual numbers? Adonomics™, formerly Appaholic, provides a stock-market-style analysis of the Facebook platform to track application growth, activity, and valuation.

The Trifecta: Facebook, Agile, and Ruby on Rails

Launched in May of 2007, the Facebook application environment provides a unique platform including a powerful programmer’s toolkit, a huge user base, and low barriers to entry. The Facebook Platform is an open-source, standards-based web service, that offers many integration points and support for several different technologies.

Facebook offers many benefits related to the social graph that includes data and pre-defined networks like geography, high school, college, and workplace, and the opportunity for users to create their own networks around interest areas. You can provide pages for groups for users to create a network around your product or brand. This data is invaluable for reaching target audiences.

Developing a Facebook application is fundamentally different from other web development projects, due to the integration with Facebook’s rapidly changing developer and user environment. Success requires constant improvement, rapid response to changing development environments, and dealing with ambiguous and shifting user demands.

An Agile development methodology fits well with the Facebook model. With an Agile process you can see progress every day. Agile is designed to allow you to develop and deliver applications within tight timeframes and through short iterations that quickly set priorities, identify issues, reduce risks and incorporate changing requirements into the overall development process. Each iteration delivers working software that has been fully tested and implemented, providing opportunities for quick feedback from potential consumers and continual improvement.

Ruby on Rails is a best of breed environment for rapid web application development. By using the Facebooker plugin, Ruby on Rails development can be completely integrated with the Facebook platform, treating Facebook user data as an extension of Rails session and user management features. The Facebook platform coupled with Agile and Ruby on Rails is an explosive recipe for delivering Facebook applications with the speed and responsiveness you need for best results. With Facebook the question is not, ‘How do we grow?’ but ‘How do we scale?’. Rails development can easily be integrated into an on-demand server environment, such as the one provided by Amazon’s EC2, to meet the potentially explosive growth of a successful Facebook application.

Breaking Away From the Pack

The possibilities and opportunities related to Facebook and endless. As Facebook continues to go mainstream and appeal to wider audiences, its range of applications and its potential for success continues to grow. It is becoming a de facto portal for individuals and major corporations alike. From a development standpoint it provides an easy and open platform that supports rapid development and easy integration.

Using Agile development practices together with Ruby on Rails can accelerate your opportunity exponentially. It can significantly reduce the time between your initial deployment to an almost overnight success. Leverage Facebook’s networks, relationships and existing data to quickly build and extend targeted applications that translate into lower costs, faster time to market, and greater results.

About the Authors

Dietrich Kappe is Pathfinder’s Chief Technology Officer is responsible for assessing the impact of technology on consumers, markets, and organizations and providing thought leadership, and strategic direction. Dietrich has over 17 years of enterprise software development, systems architecture design, and information technology consulting experience.

Noel Rappin is the Vice President of Pathfinder’s Ruby on Rails Practice. His most recent book, Professional Ruby on Rails, was released by WROX in February 2008. Before joining Pathfinder, Noel led several Agile based projects at Motorola as a senior software engineer and technical lead. His previous publications include several technical articles and co-author of wxPython in Action and Jython Essentials.

Both are contributors to the Agile Ajax blog at: blogs.pathf.com/agileajax/

About Pathfinder Development

Pathfinder is a consulting firm specializing in software development and user experience design. We have considerable expertise with Ruby on Rails and developing Facebook applications. Our clients range from early stage start-ups to Fortune 5 companies across a wide array of industries, including energy, healthcare, insurance, financial services, media and publishing.