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Facebook App Economy: The Job Impact of Facebookonomics

A recent study published by the University of Maryland indicates that Facebook and mobile technology have generated at least 182,000 new jobs and $12.19 billion in wages and benefits. The study, which was released by the Robert H. Smith School of Business this morning, stated that more aggressive estimates indicate that the “Facebook App Economy” could be responsible for as many as 235,644 jobs and a $15.71 billion impact on the economy.

The research found that 53,000 of the jobs created were people directly employed by software companies that design Facebook apps. For example, Zynga, the popular social gaming company, has over 2,000 employees.  This quickly growing company  is worth an estimated $15 to $20 billion dollars and recently announced plans for an IPO. Zynga is one of the many companies that employs Flash, C++, PHP and Java programmers to program Facebook Apps.

In addition to direct employment, the Facebook App Economy created at least an additional 129,000 jobs related to supply and increased spending.

Il Horn Hann, co-director of the Smith School’s Center for Digital Innovation, Technology, and Strategy said the following:

“Our findings confirm that social media platforms have created a thriving new industry. As Facebook and other platforms grow, we will continue to see job growth and the ripple effects of these advances in the U.S. economy.”

In addition to Facebook app development, Facebook-related job growth has been propelled by the over 2.5 million websites and companies that are now integrated with Facebook. These companies are hiring web designers, social media consultants, and page managers.

Since Facebook launched in 2004, it has increased its staff by over 50% each year. The social media giant, which now has over 750 million users, directly employs over 2,000 workers.

The numbers posted in this Facebook-funded study were higher than expected.

My Apps for Facebooks

Angel@Heart
Sweet@Heart
Dark@Heart
Rain
Broken@Heart
Facebook Applications by Stokes

How To Build A Facebook Application

Facebook, as you’ve probably noticed, is everywhere. And with that ubiquity comes a massive audience just waiting for your web app. Whether you’re looking to make things easier for your current users, or you have the perfect idea for a Facebook-only application, there are a few things you’ll need to know to get started.

Getting Started

FBML is basically the HTML you know and love, so we’ll include a heading and a stylesheet. The link element isn’t permitted and the@import rule isn’t supported either, so the simplest solution is to use a server-side include.

In order to install Facebook applications, or indeed to write your own, you need a Facebook account. You’ll also want to install the Developer application—this lets you create your own Facebook applications, as well as monitor their usage and configure various settings. You’ll also need your own web server; Facebook apps run direct from your own server—which means that you can write them in whatever language or framework you prefer. We’ll be using PHP in our examples, but the principles are the same for any language.

The Facebook Platform

Facebook have done a pretty good job of documenting the fundamental components of their platform over on their developer site. The platform consists of three core parts:

• API – The API defines the various methods through which you can interact with Facebook. If you’re not familiar with the idea of an API, take a look at some recent Digital Web articles: APIs and Mashups for the Rest of Us and Hacking on Open APIs.
• FBML – Facebook Markup Language is a custom markup language based on various bits of HTML. It’s similar to Coldfusion or ASP.NET’s tag-based syntax, and is used to define the pages in your application.
• FQL – Facebook Query Language is SQL for Facebook. A powerful query language for situations where there are no existing helper methods in the API, or handy tags in FBML, to do exactly what you need.

We’ll be stepping through the development of a simple application which will demonstrate usage of FBML and the API.

As well as the core documentation, Facebook also makes available a set of useful tools and resources for developers. The tools are particularly useful for debugging raw API calls or tweaking FQL. The resources section contains official libraries for PHP and Java, with links to unofficial libraries for ActionScript, Cocoa, Coldfusion, .NET, Perl, Python and Ruby, and there is also a growing community wiki.

A typical page on Facebook is quite complicated, with lots of different elements on the page. Via FBML and the API you can influence most of these so it’s worth getting familiar with the terminology usedbefore you get started. If you know your Profile from your News Feed then you’re good to go!

Example Application: Birthdays Book

We’re going to jump straight in to a full-blown application rather than start with a simple, but pretty useless, “Hello World” example. The application is called Birthdays Book, and it’s going to provide you with a list of your friends on Facebook, ordered by their upcoming birthdays.

The first thing you’ll want to do is set up your web server with the relevant Facebook client for your preferred language or framework. Our examples are in PHP so we want the official PHP library files.

Next you’ll want to create a new application from the Developer application you added to your Facebook profile earlier. Just click ‘Set Up New Application’ in the top right corner of the application page to get started. The next page has lots of hidden fields that you’ll need to fill in. Click ‘Optional Fields’ to get started. (Obviously you should replace the placeholders with the location and name of your own application.)

Field	Value
Callback URL	http://www.yoursite.com/yourapplication
Canvas Page URL	My Example Application
Can your Applications be added on Facebook?	Yes
Post-Add URL	http://apps.facebook.com/yourapplication
Developer Mode	Yes
Side Nav URL	http://apps.facebook.com/yourapplication
Private Installation	Yes

Note that some of these only appear once you’ve answered certain questions. We’ll tick ‘Developer Mode’ and ‘Private Installation’ while we’re developing our app so as to avoid prying eyes—you can un-tick these once you’re ready for others to see and install your creation. There are lots of other settings you can tweak and information you can add, but this is a good starting point for our simple application.

Building The Application

On this occasion we’re only going to have one page in our application, but it’s still good form to move common behavior and configuration into a separate file. We start out by including the client library and setting our API key and application “secret” (password). You should be able to get these from the ‘My Applications’ page after you have set up your new application.

We also set the url for where we are storing our code:

$appcallbackurl = 'YOUR_URL';

In order to use this application you’re going to have to be logged in to Facebook, so we’ll include a snippet from the Facebook code samples to make sure the current user is set up properly:

$user = $facebook->require_login();

//catch the exception that gets thrown if the cookie has an invalid session_key in it
try
{
  if (!$facebook->api_client->users_isAppAdded())
  {
    $facebook->redirect($facebook->get_add_url());
  }
}
catch (Exception $ex)
{
  //this will clear cookies for your application and redirect them to a login prompt
  $facebook->set_user(null, null);
  $facebook->redirect($appcallbackurl);
}

Save the above code as config.php. Now that we have our configuration file, we can start on our main application page—we’ll call this index.php. First we need to include the above configuration file:

Then we need to get a list of all the current user’s friends’ birthdays, which we will store in the$friends variable:

$friends = $facebook->api_client->users_getinfo($facebook->api_client->friends_get(), 'birthday');
?>

It’s worth breaking this line of code down, as it demonstrates how to make API calls using the library. We’re using two API methods in order to get the information we want: Users.getInfo and Friends.get.

(Note that the API docs do not provide details of the parameters or parameter order required by the library—you’ll need to delve into the source code of your chosen library to discover this information. The official libraries are well-documented with comments so you should be able to find your way around—just remember the API method Users.getInfo becomes the users_getinfo library method in the PHP library.)

Birthday Books

FBML is basically the HTML you know and love, so we’ll include a heading and a stylesheet. The linkelement isn’t permitted and the @import rule isn’t supported either, so the simplest solution is to use a server-side include. There are some more useful CSS tips on the developer wiki. Now we start with the bulk of our application.

First we’ll set-up a couple of empty arrays for storing information about our friends. We’ll also set a timestamp of the current day and month and store it in the variable $now. We do this so that later on we can work out whether a birthday has already occurred in this year. For a full list of formatting options for the date function see the PHP date page.

We already have a list of our friends in the $friends variable so let’s loop through that. What we’re aiming for at the other end is an array of our friends arranged into upcoming birthday order.
foreach ($friends as $friend) {

We’ll hold details of each person in a placeholder array called $person, then place each $person with birthday information into another array called $with_birthday. We’re going to want to get at their name, their profile picture, and details of their birthday. For ease of reference we store these against relevant keys in the array: name, image, month, day, year.
$person = array();
$person['name'] = '';
$person['image'] = '';


Here we have an example of the special FBML markup tags. Facebook users are referenced by a unique identifier which is returned by various API methods. We pass this uid value to the fb:name andfb:profile tags which return the name and profile picture of that user. A full list of FBML tags, along with lots of examples of usage, can be found on the wiki. Core documentation really is one of the strengths of the Facebook platform.
$person['day'] = date("jS", strtotime($friend[birthday]));
$person['month'] = date("F", strtotime($friend[birthday]));
$person['absolute_timestamp'] = strtotime($friend[birthday]);
$person['relative_timestamp'] = strtotime($person['month'] . $person['day']);

if ($person['relative_timestamp'] < $now)
{
  // birthday has already happened this year
  $person['year'] = date('Y', strtotime('+1 year'));
}
else
{
  // birthday still to come this year
  $person['year'] = date('Y');
}

$person['relative_timestamp_with_year'] = strtotime($person['month'] . $person['day'] . $person['year']);


Not everyone enters their birthday details into Facebook. We’ll store those people in the$without_birthday array for now. You could always do something with this information later.
if ($person['absolute_timestamp'])
  {
    $with_birthday[] = $person;
  }
  else
  {
    $without_birthday[] = $person;
  }
}


Now we have an array of people with birthdays we can loop through, but they’re in the wrong order. We’ll use the handy PHP array_multisort function to remedy the situation. array_multisort allows us to sort a given dataset ($with_birthdays) by one column (‘relative_timestamp_with_year’) using different order flags (in this case SORT_ASC, an ascending sort).
foreach ($with_birthday as $key => $row)
{
  $relative_timestamp_with_year[$key] = $row['relative_timestamp_with_year'];
}

array_multisort($relative_timestamp_with_year, SORT_ASC, $with_birthday);

?>


All we need to do now is loop through our final, sorted array and output a table of our friends together with their birthdays. We’ve thrown in some microformats to make it possible to export the data later:


';
  echo '';
  echo '';
  echo '';
  echo '';
}

?>


' . $friend['image'] . '
' . $friend['name'] . '
' 
     . $friend['day'] . ' ' . $friend['month'] . ' ' . $friend['year'] . '

We now have version one of our Birthdays Book application. As a final touch, we’ll track how many people are using our application using Google Analytics. We can’t include Javascript in our pages, but there is a handy FBML tag, fb:google-analytics—just include your unique identifier from Google Analytics in the uacct parameter.

The finished application can be found at apps.facebook.com/birthdaysbook and you can download the source files at www.digital-web.com/extras/facebook_application.

Summary

Once you have a simple app up and running the next things you’ll want to look at are ways of interacting with the rest of Facebook. Take a look at Profile.setFBML, Feed.publishActionOfUser, andNotifications.send to get you started.

The Facebook platform isn’t standing still. Look out for the new mobile additions which allow for mobile optimised content, as well as sending SMS messages from your apps. Even more interesting are the new Data APIs, which let Facebook deal with the problem of scaling data storage while you get on with developing your applications.

If you can already build simple websites you can build Facebook applications. Being able to use your preferred language or framework really helps and the quality of the core documentation means the best way to learn is to jump in with your own ideas.

In the second part of this article we’ll be taking a closer look at getting information out of your Facebook applications and onto peoples profile pages.

25 Awesome Facebook Apps for Designers

Facebook might not have all the glittery text and obnoxious backgrounds that MySpace has, but it still has its fair share of useless apps.

This is especially true if you have ever tried to search for creative Facebook apps or those that may be of interest to creative people.

If you have ever searched for such a thing, you have no doubt realized that there is an abundance of useless apps. This is the reason that I went through just about every app on Facebook to find the very few that were best suited for creative individuals, or had some sort of visual flair about them.

So here are 25 awesome Facebook applications that most designers will enjoy in their Facebook pages.

1. Addicted to Photoshop

This is a neat app brought to you by the master minds behind the “Sheezy” sites (Brusheezy, Flasheezy, etc).

“Photoshop Brush Junkies Rejoice! Get your daily fix of new Photoshop brushes and patterns from Brusheezy.com!”

2. Design Directory

Get the latest news on just about everything in the design industry right on your Facebook page.

“Add the Dexigner app to your Facebook, get latest updates, news, events, and competitions.”

3. My Merch Store

If you have a Zazzle store and a Facebook page, it only makes sense to have this app to help you sell more.

“Zazzle lets you create and post products for sale to your profile, share products that you like, discover great artists and buy truly unique products.”

4. Photography

Just a simple app that lets you show off professional photography that you find creative or inspiring.

“Choose from thousands of great photographs, landscapes, portraits, historical moments, they’re all there for you to show on your profile! You can show multiple images, random photos, or a slideshow!”

5. Group Photo Album

With this app you and your friends can create group albums with all of your own photos.

“Group Photo Album works with multiple Facebook albums so all your friends can easily post their pics, reconfigure albums on the fly, provide witty commentary and create together. You can share it publicly for viewing and commenting, but only the friends you invite can post and move images.”

6. Art Yourself

Ever wanted to be an Art collector? Well, now you can with the Art Yourself app.

“Start collecting living masterpieces now and share them with your friends. Art Yourself by displaying your collection on your profile. Finding excellent art and meeting artists has never been easier! Share with others by posting collected pieces on a friends wall or adding them to your messages! Art Yourself is not just a Facebook app, it’s a society withing Facebook.”

7. The Ultimate Vision Board

Everyone needs some inspiration from time to time to remind them of what they are after in life.

“Vision boards takes writing down your goals to the next level by using pictures, making your goals visually appealing and specific. This will inspire and energize you and accelerate your progress! Tony Robbins also promotes the concept calling it a “Treasure Map.”

8. JPG Themes

If you are a regular reader and participant of the JPG magazine, you might be interested in this app that lets you vote and show off your choices.

“JPG Magazine is the photography magazine created by YOU. It is your submissions and your votes that determine what goes into each issue. Now, you can add the JPG Theme application to your Facebook profile and encourage your friends to vote for your photos submitted to each JPG theme. If you are published, you will win $100, a subscription to JPG Magazine, and your photos will be printed on our next issue!”

9. Picnik

This is a smaller, Facebook friendly version of the popular online photo editor.

“All our Edit tools are free, including auto- fix, rotate, crop, resize, exposure, color adjustments, basic sharpening, and red eye fixing.”

10. PhotoPop

Use this app to give your photos a comic book like feel with speech bubbles.

“Animate your photos or your friends’ photos. Send your creations to friends using the built-in messaging feature. It’s never been easier to add stuff to your pictures! For starters, add speech and thought bubbles.”

11. TouchGraph Photos

See a visual connection between you and all of your friends and your friends friends.

“TouchGraph lets you see how your friends are connected, and who has the most photos together. ”

12. Art

A small app to help you release your creative stress. Kill time with this spin art like app.

“Create pieces of art.”

13. My Favorite Color

What’s the first question you usually ask someone you want to get to know? What’s your favorite color? Now you can show instead of tell.

“This application will allow you to show the world, on your profile, what your favorite color is.”

14. My Label

Feel like playing dress up? Use this app to create your own clothes and t-shirt designs.

“Send the latest, hottest, sexiest clothing to your friends! If that’s not enough for you, then create your own fashion and upload it, then either wear it, add it to your wardrobe, or send it as a gift. With many different styles to choose from, let the world know how stylish (or anti-stylish) you are!”

15. LunaPic Photo Editor

Another online photo editor specially made for Facebook that allows you to edit and spice up your photos.

“Edit Your photos with the click of a button. Save back to your Facebook account. Cool effects and features including: Cut, crop, rotate, sharpen, blend and cool animation effects. (New) Browse and Edit your friend’s pictures as well!”

16. Six Degrees

Another app that gives you a visual representation of you, your friends, and the people they know.

“This application is intended to test the 6 degrees of separation idea through the connections of Facebook users. What does it do? You can use the application to search for other users on Facebook and show how you’re connected to them through friends.”

17. Graffiti

A fun little app that lets you create “graffiti” that you can send to your friends or post on your profile page.

“Draw graffiti for your friends.”

18. Flickr Photosets

A powerful app that lets you show off some of your Flicker photos and sets on your profile page.

“With Flickr Photosets you’ll also be able to display a small selection of your photos or sets right on your profile! You can select from either your most recent photos, fairly recent photos, or even random photos. You can also choose to filter the photos by specific tags.”

19. My Flickr

You can use this app to search for photos on Flickr that you want to show off on your profile page.

“Find exactly the photos you want to show using simple search criteria such as: Recent Photos, Tags, Photosets, Favorites, Groups, Interestingness, Date Range, Flickr Privacy, and all “sorts” of other sorting and features. Easily showcase your Photo Search results on your Profile/Page or My Flickr profile Tab.”

20. zuPort: Flickr

Another Flickr app, but this one is probably the most powerful out of the three on this list.

“You can customize zuPort: Flickr in the settings window, located on your zuPort: Flickr Library page. Customization allows you to pick how many photos to show in your profile, how your photos are displayed, which photos are shown and much more.”

21. Threadless Plus

Do you have shirt designs on Threadless or have an account for street team points? This app can help you on all counts.

“Share your Threadless collection and promote your submissions! Features: Opt to get notifications of new Threadless releases in your News Feed, Easily earn Street Team points from other app users with “Share the Love”, Keep a nice list of the Threadless shirts you own, List your submissions and critiques too!”

22. Slideshows and Photos

The photo page not quite doing it for you? This app can give you a little bit of spice for showing off photos.

“Bring your Facebook photos to life with an animated Slideshow or show them off directly on your profile with a Photo Strip. Tons of customization options are available, and setup is super easy. Even cooler, our photo browsing experience let’s you quickly flip through all your friends’ Facebook albums – no more clicking through endless photo pages!”

23. Sketch Me

Just a simple app that gives your photo that computer animated sketched look.

“Bored with your profile picture? This app creates an artistic pencil sketch based on your profile photo! You don’t have to do anything … this app will automatically create your sketch for you.”

24. Famous Art

Another simple app that lets you show off classic works of art on your profile page.

“Do you like classic art? Then use this app to show all your Facebook friends and family!”

25. Phixr Photo Editor

A pretty powerful online photo editor for “photoshopping” your image when you’re on the road and Photoshop isn’t an option.

“Phixr can e-mail photos directly to your friends, and it can upload photos to your accounts at Facebook, flickr, Picasa Web Albums, SmugMug and many, many more. More than ANY of our competitors! Phixr even fully supports Facebook’s photo tags!”

Understanding what Facebook apps really know (FAQ)

Do Facebook apps sell you out? Judging by the contents of a Wall Street Journal report last week, one could easily get the idea that a massive lapse in oversight on Facebook's behalf led a bevy of opportunistic developers to start selling user data off to marketers and advertisers. Or not. Plenty of tech journalists jumped to Facebook's defense and poked holes in the the Journal's page-one story.

The result was a rather muddled mess. Because, yes, it's a problem if developers are going behind Facebook's back and selling user data. But even if so, it still isn't particularly new and shocking: tech industry insiders say Facebook has been aware of this, and continually policing it like a game of Whac-A-Mole, since the platform's early days.

What exactly was this "privacy breach," if any, and what can Facebook users learn from it all? CNET breaks it down for you here.

Do third-party apps on Facebook really have access to loads of personal information?
Many of them do. That is, of course, if you give them permission. But at this point, hitting that "Connect with Facebook" button has become second nature to many of the social network's users, and loads of them hastily click through without thinking what kind of information might be handed over. If you're concerned about who has access to your information, make a habit of thinking before you click.

What caused last week's scandal?
The Wall Street Journal investigation pitched the issue as a "Facebook privacy breach." That isn't really the best way to phrase it; there was no hole, hack, or exploit that led to last week's report. The "breach" in question is the fact that, as a rule, some information about Facebook users is transmitted to third-party applications that sync up to Facebook. Among that is the user ID number, which can be matched up to a profile and all of the public information contained within--which includes first and last name by default, and often significantly more information based on how much that member has opted to render public.

The Journal's investigation found that many app developers have been selling or transmitting those user IDs to outside companies. Some of those outside companies, in turn, are data-collection or advertising firms with their own databases to which they can match up public Facebook profile data to bigger compendiums of personal information.

The real scandal, if there is one, is that this is a violation of Facebook's developer terms of service and yet it had been going on for an undetermined amount of time on behalf of most of the social network's biggest developers. Facebook has said that this sharing of user identification numbers was, in many cases, inadvertent, and that the company is "investigating a technical solution to the issue." Some cynics obviously don't buy that, and believe that Facebook may have turned a blind eye to it in the interest of keeping massive Platform apps--which are a big Facebook traffic draw--growing quickly and profitably.

"Our policy is very clear about protecting user data, ensuring that no one can access private user information without explicit user consent," a post on the Facebook developer blog read. "Further, developers cannot disclose user information to ad networks and data brokers. We take strong measures to enforce this policy, including suspending and disabling applications that violate it."

"Any time you go to any retail site on the Internet, any hospitality site, any restaurant site, any number of sites, and you put in your information--your name, your address, your e-mail address, where you live, those kinds of things...unless you opt out, then someone's likely to sell that information and then you're going to be subjected to all kinds of advertisements."

--Scott Vernick, attorney

Is this just lip service? Does Facebook actually combat the exploitation of user data by third parties
Yes, Facebook has a history of blocking and unblocking apps, including those made by big-ticket developers, in accordance with security problems as well as newly developed features that Facebook decides aren't kosher. When a developer found a security hole in Top Friends, an app manufactured by then-leading Facebook widget-maker Slide, Facebook temporarily suspended the app. The terms of the platform, too, are malleable as a result: "Forced invites" were permissible in the platform's early days, until Facebook realized that they were effectively being used to spam members' friends. The social network banned forced invites, and reportedly warned developers that their apps could be blocked if forced-invite activity was detected.

"They've seen this before already, where they made changes to their privacy policy and made sure that their application vendors were aware that they were not supposed to be doing this because they'd had abuse previously," Chet Wisniewski, an analyst with security firm Sophos, told CNET last week.

Politically, Facebook also wants to wield sufficient influence over the Platform. Some app developers have grown extremely large and gained an extraordinary amount of boardroom clout with Facebook, to the extent that Facebook has been forced to negotiate on occasion. Some of these instances of marketers snapping up Facebook profile data from app manufacturers to complete people-search databases--a company called Rapleaf appears to have been doing just that--could undermine Facebook's hold on the data of 500 million users.

While Facebook executives talk about making the world a more "open and connected" place, the company clearly understands the value of that information. Just look at how hesitant it's been in the past to join initiatives where a significant amount of user data would be swapped with other companies; from a pure business standpoint, Facebook probably doesn't want it to be making the rounds outside of its control. And, ultimately, that's good for users who are concerned about third parties doing too much with their data.

How can I best be in control of what's getting shared with third-party applications?
You aren't using SuperPoke anymore, so why are you still permitting it to access your data? You can turn this off pretty easily through Facebook's new application dashboard, perhaps one of the best products that the social network has launched in the past year with regard to user control and privacy. It's not, however, the easiest feature to access on Facebook. You'll want to go up to the upper right-hand corner of any Facebook page, to the "Account" drop-down menu, and select "Privacy Settings." On the page that then loads, click the "Applications and Websites" link in the bottom left-hand corner.

You should check up on the application dashboard regularly in the same way that you keep tabs on your credit card billing statement. (I had no idea that I still was granting permission to the "CollegeHumor Insult Generator," for example. Though I'm sure CollegeHumor had only the most honorable of intentions with my personal data, I promptly gave it the ax.) If there's anything you haven't heard of, no longer use, or aren't comfortable with the level of information shared with it, just remove it, and it can't glean any new data from you.

Also, take a moment to look at the "Info accessible through your friends" section. Uncheck anything that you don't want to be accessible by applications your friends install.

The catch, though, is that Facebook does not guarantee that a deleted application will in turn remove data that you've already shared with it. The company recommends that users contact the application developers directly in that case--which is, particularly with applications run by huge companies, a hassle to say the least.

How does this compare to what other companies, online and offline, might know and sell about you?
Truth be told, the best argument in favor of not freaking out about what FarmVille might be doing with your data is the plain fact that there are a lot of services and programs out there that know a whole lot more about you than most Facebook applications ever will--and, yes, they sometimes sell it. If you count yourself as a member of the modern consumer economy, you're probably a participant. Credit card companies, retailer loyalty programs, and online travel booking sites are only a few of the establishments that have been known to share information

Facebook applications "probably got access to less information than if you went to Orbitz and signed up and didn't opt out," attorney and privacy specialist Scott Vernick of the law firm Fox Rothschild LLP told CNET. And, he noted, that opt-out can be difficult to spot. "Any time you go to any retail site on the Internet, any hospitality site, any restaurant site, any number of sites, and you put in your information--your name, your address, your e-mail address, where you live, those kinds of things," he explained, "unless you opt out, then someone's likely to sell that information and then you're going to be subjected to all kinds of advertisements."

And when you consider that many consumers have been turning over information in this manner for years, if not decades, the idea of FarmVille having access to your Facebook profile seems a little more benign. Perhaps the most important thing to remember is that even if Facebook gives you a profile field to fill out, you aren't obliged to put anything in it