I confess that I have become a Facebook addict since my summertime conversion earlier this year. This is perhaps a bit obvious, but one thing I really enjoy about the service vs. other social networking sites is the fact that there are so many third-party applications, made possible by what is called an API. This allows people to, for example, brag about places they have traveled (courtesy of tripadvisor) or try to turn each other into zombies (perhaps a too-apt metaphor for online marketing).
Editor and Publisher’s Steve Outing gives the download on how the news business might get into the game:
If you’re going to develop a headline feed app for Facebook, do some serious thinking about the content. Perusing the list of third-party applications that are headline feeds, many of them sport seriously underwhelming user numbers. The ones that seem to do best are sports feeds.
I’d recommend picking fairly narrow — but interesting or unusual or useful — content to become headline feeds. Just as an example of something that might work with the Facebook crowd: If you’ve got a pro football team in your town, develop a headline feed application for that. How about a celebrity headline feed, where the user selects the celebrity to track?
As a Facebook user, I do worry about the privacy implications of flinging my data all over the place to third-party apps (I concede that privacy is a relative term once going online and spraying my personal data all over the place). But the applications are a fun way to express oneself and share information with friends.
