Early experiences with Facebook

We are newbies on Facebook, and we are learning everyday. Facebook is still a very nascent opportunity, and I tell people everyday to get their asses here before it gets saturated. It's the next big landgrab of the net.

Everything you've heard about the Facebook platform is true -- it is truly one of the most powerful tool available to developers today to build something for the social networks and try it out with one of the biggest social graphs out there. We launched Shared Memories just 3 days ago, and we are right now into a few hundred users banging at the application, creating content -- and having fun with it! All things put aside, a developer will understand how extremely satisfying that experience can be -- to build something, put it out in front of an audience, and watch them grab it openly.

Before we go further -- Have you shared a memory with your friends yet? [Facebook link]

What's been our experience like so far? Good overall. Here's a short summary -- and we plan to write more about it as we continue to build.

The Good:
- The Social. When you put together the tools available to you -- the network, the news feeds, the notifications, the messaging -- it packs enormous power.
- Tools, API, and Integration. Thanks to the their Wiki, Developer application, other apps like Appsaholic, groups, etc., getting things set up and going is a charm.
- Simplicity. Facebook has taken special effort to make it simple for developers to integrate. As a result, the documentation is simple and integration poins are well defined.
- Data -- Facebook has been very open and that's a good thing. Their terms dictate that you can't store most of the data, but it helps your application build the right thing for the user.

The Bad
- Performance -- Facebook as a site is tad slow. Every page on the canvas tends to make calls back from our servers to FB to get additional data. All put together, this can compound the wait time for the user. Their service and platform also occasionally gets hiccups. We aren't busy enough (yet :) to experience the platform misteps, but we've seen a few.

We've already built in components in our system to rigorously measure the call times and the ability to not let them stack up in case of traffic growth. In the future posts we'll share some of the details of the performance of the Facebook api calls.

All said, it is an exciting opportunity to be a part of.