At Stanford University they offer a course, Creating Engaging Facebook Apps, where students create in small teams their own Facebook applications. The goal is to recognize the underlying fundamentals of successful applications that utilize the Faceboo…

(a) Classes at MIT have a strong theoretical foundation. Putting this type of class on the same level as Artificial Intelligence, Algorithms, and Distributed Systems seems wrong to me in some way.

(b) Most MIT students that are interested in applied systems would just code up an application on their own. They wouldn’t need/want a class to tell them how to do it. Perhaps this is a cultural difference between MIT/Stanford.

(c) MIT tends to focus on more general skills instead of learning the specifics of FBML or other proprietary APIs.

I still stand by my previous comment that these applications need to be an extension of some larger product. As such, teaching HTML, Javascript, CSS, etc. makes sense, but why focus only on FB apps?

Nonetheless, great job with the class thus far! And, I look forward to using some of these sweet apps.

http://www.meetingflex.com
Social Networking + Video - Crap

Social Buzz is about sharing content that interests you with your friends with the purpose of receiving feedback. The goal is to share relevant content to the right friends to get positive feedback and show your expertise on a given subject.

Bringing the HTML back into the design is in fact a step back. Web software companies like Google, Micorsoft, Oracle, Sun, Yahoo are realizing that the best way to separate UI design from code is to allow Information Architects and UI designers be best at what they do and work with granular UI components and technologies like Java Server Faces and not HTML. With new standards like JSR227 in work, we will soon see a nice abstraction for data binding UI components to back end data sources which will make UI design even more declarative. HTML + Code just does not scale with the new application trends and modern software complexities.

So HTML really is a step back from UI Component model. FBML is right along the idea of Java Server Faces, which makes Facebook a lot more innovative in that respect.

To give you an example of how backward HTML is to FBML, consider adding a “Friend Invite” page to your application. In Facebook FBML, this can be accomplished by writing three lines of text. In HTML, this would translate to writing over hundred lines of HTML, CSS (style definitions), Controller/Validation logic (choose java, php..).

Facebook is clearly a winner in this one. The next logical step would be for them to try to standardize FBML into a widely adopted “social networking markup”.

We’ve been trying to get a similar course off the ground at Purdue: http://cs490e.wiki.zoho.com

re: approach, we have each 3-person team to build 1-2 apps on facebook as specific class outputs, however in addition to those practical objectives our course covers the following related topics:
* how to build social web apps (on FB now; other platforms in future)
* understanding persuasive technology as applied to user experience
* understanding viral distribution using social networks
* applying web metrics for product design & marketing
* learning about the business & marketing of startups

obviously as one of the instructors i’m biased, but i think our class is more relevant to today’s software engineers & entrepreneurs than most traditional engineering curriculum, both for economics & educational reasons. the skills & theory we’re teaching are immediately practical for our students, and have real-world impact.

we’ve also been fortunate to have involvement in the class from people at Facebook, Google, Slide, RockYou, and many other tech-focused companies, as both guest speakers & educators. it’s been a tremendous opportunity to see how we can bring both industry & academia together to create a great learning experience for students.

Along with the rest of the teaching team, Prof. BJ Fogg & I are still learning how best to teach the course, so we know we’re still in “alpha” ourselves. as dan mentioned above, we’ll likely be adding / refining our approach next semester, and adding info on how to develop for the recently-announced OpenSocial API standard from Google as well as ongoing interest in the Facebook platform.

but so far, both instructors & students are having a blast

- dave “not a professor, just a visiting lecturer” mcclure
http://500hats.typepad.com/

http://fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com

Our students have gotten about 150,000 installs so far in total, and we’re optimistic that as all the teams iterate on their apps we’ll start to see some more interesting and viral concepts emerge.

We’re going to start doing a better job of sharing the insights and lessons from the class online, so stay tuned. The class website/blog is at - http://captology.stanford.edu/facebook for anyone who is interested in following along as we go.

Re: your comment- “That said, much of the Stanford class is dedicated to the concepts that are pertinent to application development on any social network platform”……BJ, Dave and I are currently talking about v.2 of the class next quarter (potentially) and OpenSocial/MySpace are definitely part of that discussion. What we’re doing on Facebook is really exciting, but the real takeaway is that the lessons we’re uncovering can (and will) be applied to apps built on any social platform, not just FB.

Dan (Facebook Class TA)
http://www.ackermangreenberg.com

Besides, I think this teaches the students the wrong mentality in the first place. 99.9% of the time Facebook apps should be an extension of the product, not the product itself.

TechCrunch, plz note this point.

“Where’s the, “haha we kicked USC’s ass” app?”

That app only gets released once every 6 or 7 years. Haha!

I was wondering if the author of this post could please update the name of our app (The Gumball Machine) and name it “The Giving Tree” since we have changed the name recently. The app is not yet listed in the FB directory - but will be soon! We are ready to get real money soon and come out with The Giving Tree v. 2.0. Get excited! Feel free to email with questions at: raghav.h at gmail.

Anyway, I appreciate the response to my venting. I suppose my feelings would be more directed at some of Mike’s articles rather than this one. And btw, thanks for the round-up - I’ve already installed one of the apps to test out.