Seems like everyone's on Facebook these days—people are on it to socialize; businesses are on it to try to attract those people's attention. But the same is true for other older social networks such as LinkedIn, Friendster, and MySpace. Facebook's reach goes far beyond these; my small town's high street car park proudly displays a "Like Us On Facebook" sign.
More and more Flash games and Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) are allowing users to log in using their Facebook account—it's a safe assumption that most users will have one. Companies are asking freelancers for deeper Facebook integration in their projects. It's practically a buzzword.
But why the big fuss?
Facebook benefits from the snowball effect: it's big, so it gets bigger.
People sign up because most of their friends are already on it, which is generally not the case for, say, Twitter. Businesses sign up because they can reach so many people. It's a virtuous circle.
There's a low barrier to entry, too; it's not just for techies, or even people who are "pretty good with computers;" even old people and luddites use Facebook. In February 2010, the technology blog ReadWriteWeb published an article called "Facebook Wants to Be Your One True Login," about Facebook's attempts to become the de facto login system throughout the Web. Within minutes, the comments filled up with posts from confused Facebook users:
Evidently, the ReadWriteWeb article had temporarily become the top search result for Facebook Login, leading hundreds of Facebook users, equating Google or Bing with the Internet, to believe that this blog post was actually a redesigned Facebook.com. The comment form, fittingly, had a Sign in with Facebook button that could be used instead of manually typing in a name and e-mail address to sign a comment—and of course, the Facebook users misinterpreted this as the new Log in button.
And yet… all of those people manage to use Facebook, keenly enough to throw a fit when it apparently became impossible to use. It's not just a site for geeks and students; it has serious mass market appeal.
Even "The Social Network"—a movie based on the creation of Facebook—held this level of appeal: it opened at #1 and remained there for its second weekend.
According to Facebook's statistics page (http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics), over 500 million people log in to Facebook in any given month (as of November 2010). For perspective, the population of the entire world is just under 7,000 million.
Twitter is estimated to have 95 million monthly active users (according to the eMarketer.com September 2010 report), as is MySpace. FarmVille, the biggest game based on the Facebook platform, has over 50 million: more than half the population of either competing social network.
FarmVille has been reported to be hugely profitable, with some outsider reports claiming that its parent company, Zynga, has generated twice as much profit as Facebook itself (though take this with a grain of salt). Now, of course, not every Facebook game or application can be that successful, and FarmVille does benefit from the same snowball effect as Facebook itself, making it hard to compete with—but that almost doesn't matter; these numbers validate Facebook as a platform on which a money-making business can be built.
As the aforementioned ReadWriteWeb article explained, Facebook has become a standard login across many websites. Why add yet another username/password combination to your browser's list (or your memory) if you can replace them all with one Facebook login?
This isn't restricted to posting blog comments. UK TV broadcaster, Channel 4, allows viewers to access their entire TV lineup on demand, with no need to sign up for a specific Channel 4 account:
Again, Facebook benefits from that snowball effect: as more sites enable a Facebook login, it becomes more of a standard, and yet more sites decide to add a Facebook login in order to keep up with everyone else.
Besides login capabilities, many sites also allow users to share their content via Facebook. Another UK TV broadcaster, the BBC, lets users post links for their recommended TV programs straight to Facebook:
Blogs—or, indeed, many websites with articles—allow readers to Like a post, publishing this fact on Facebook and on the site itself:
So half a billion people use the Facebook website every month, and at the same time, Facebook spreads further and further across the Internet—and even beyond. "Facebook Messages" stores user's entire conversational histories, across e-mail, SMS, chat, and Facebook itself; "Facebook Places" lets users check into a physical location, letting friends know that they're there.
No other network has this reach.
With all this expansion, it's difficult for a developer to keep up with the Facebook platform. And sometimes there are bugs, and undocumented areas, and periods of downtime, all of which can make development harder still.
But the underlying system—the Graph API, introduced in April 2010—is fascinating. The previous API had become bloated and cumbersome over its four years; the Graph API feels well-designed with plenty of room for expansion.
This book mainly focuses on the Graph API, as it is the foundation of modern Facebook development. You'll be introduced to it properly in Chapter 2, Welcome to the Graph.
If you're not on Facebook already, sign up now (for free) at http://facebook.com. You'll need an account in order to develop applications that use it. Spend some time getting used to it:
Set up a personal profile.
Post messages to your friends on their Walls.
See what all the FarmVille fuss is about at http://apps.facebook.com/onthefarm.
Check in to a location using Facebook Places.
Log in to some blogs using your Facebook account.
Share some YouTube videos on your own Wall from the YouTube website.
"Like" something.
Go native!