Code ExplodeGreat software can make life better

Hello World! , Its been a while since I have blogged.

I have developed a few internal facebook apps before, in my free time just to play around. One of the apps I built periodically checks a website for picture gallery updates, and syncs it with a facebook picture album. Its a very simple app, but got me around to understand the facebook app anatomy.

I have been doing some custom facebook apps for clients (can’t talk much about it), and so far it has been a good learning experience. A few things I have learned about facebook that I didn’t previously know.

According to Facebook Statistics

• More than 400 million active users
• 50% of our active users log on to Facebook in any given day (200 Million)
• More than 35 million users update their status each day .

This is some ridiculously big figures. To put this in perspective, If all the active users of facebook formed a country, it would be the third largest country after india and china.

Now Imagine this, just considering if 200 million people log onto facebook each day, and you somehow got a way to convince only 0.5% of its members to pay up only $1 in an year, you could still be making $2 million in a year. That $1 could be broken up in micropayments of 20 cents. 20 cents doesn’t sound big does it ?

I recently read an article about “How to Spam Facebook like a pro – Insider’s confession” , A very interesting read about how big money will make people cross their limits on ethics. Don’t worry I won’t do any of those. I like programming to solve real world problems, not to create em.

Another article about “Zynga” (yep the company that makes the annoying farmville app). Largest social application dev house, with about 10 million unique visitors a day. Just shows, you don’t need to make a crazy 3D super graphics game. Even with a simple flash game, you can make millions. According to allfacebook stats, its total suite of apps has about 65 million visitors a day, and about 234 million active users. (yes! this blog post is all about millions. lol! )

Another simple example, is a facebook app call “Big Prize Giveaways” which holds some sort of competition, but to take part in the competition you need to be a fan. Guess how many fans they have ? Almost 3 million. With 3 million people as fans, a company could directly reach its customers, get to know where it needs to improve its product line, get a massive list of potential buyers e.t.c

To wrap up I would like to say, I have just begun my journey into what I previously thought was just a fad, but now seems like serious platform for writing apps.

So what do you think about facebook ? Leave your thoughts below in the comments section.