These series of guest posts are written by the teams attending the Tetuan Valley Startup School 2011 Spring edition. This post is from the ReparaMiBarrio team, formed by Darko Stojanovski and David Manero.
When I first started to develop Facebook applications I thought to my self – I know PHP, what can go wrong. Well, is far from truth.
First, there is no clear way to start the development and very little documentation. Their WIKI is like lots of code snippets so you don’t get the big picture and also lots of stuff is not documented.
The only real source of some kind of help was their Forum, but I could not register for 3 months, because on the end of registration, error was shown! And, when you get in, don’t expect someone from Facebook to answer your question.
They use lots of different API-s and Interfaces: REST, GRAPH, FB-CONNECTG, FB-FRAME, FBML, FQL, FBJS…and to select the right one in the right moment is…uf, not an easy task. They also change some fundamental things without notice, so the code that was working yesterday is not working today (like I discovered a few times).
Getting the users is also not easy. They have tons of rules of what is allowed and what is forbidden. And as all things in life, usually these rules only apply to the little fish. The big boys can do what they want. And after 1 year of development for FB I can tell you one thing: if you don’t break or bend some rules, you won’t go viral.
Monetizing is another story. Facebook made a “white list” of some 30 companies that are allowed on their platform, and everyone’s favorite – Google AdSence is not there. Why? Because Facebook wants every company to sign a contract with them and provide a list of the employees that are in their Advertising division. So they want Google to give the names and numbers of their employees to Facebook!? Not likely. And now that AdSence is banned, lots of developers are thinking over whether it is still profitable to develop on their platform or switch to Mobile development.
We already started.
ReparaMiBarrio Team
