One of the important things to remember when developing for platforms such as that that Facebook provides is that, whilst it reaches millions of new users, it is still in Beta.

This whole Beta thing is constantly being reminded to developers every time something goes wrong, but it has had a slightly strange effect this week, with many developers reporting their user count (the number of Facebook users that have added their application) rocketing up by the thousands. One developer was even showing more users than Facebook itself!

As I see it, there are 2 types of Facebook developer, both of which rely quite heavily on these statistics.

1) The Entrepreneurial Developer

These make up the vast majority of developers (at least of those who post on the developer forums) and are generally the guys who come up with an idea, build an app and then sell it at it’s peak. Without the DAU (Daily active users) and Users stats, these guys would really struggle to shift their apps, as most app valuations are based on these figures.

2) The Corporate Developer

I would place myself in this bracket, as a developer who’s primary objective is to increase awareness of a brand through an application. Whilst most entrepenurial apps are branded with banner ads, mine are branded through the applications’ core, and designed with the brand in mind. The users’ statistics are equally as important to me as they are a way of justifying the money a client has spent on my time.

Whilst I am not of the persuasion that Facebook should have perfected the platform before releasing it, I do think that it’s important for there to be more feedback from the Facebook team when things like this do go wrong. This has been discussed on the forum for 3 days now and still seems to have had no official response.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 19th, 2008 at 10:24 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow responses to this entry through the Comments RSS Feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your site.