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Thanks to everyone who came out last night. Sandro did a wonderful job dispelling a lot of mystery around Facebook and the Facebook Platform. Hope everyone learned a lot and see you guys at the next meet-up in town.
Joyent will be providing FREE Facebook App Hosting in hopes of getting people interested in upgrading their hosting services once their app takes off. Seems like a great deal and Joyent has a great history of customer service and quality hosting.
Read About FREE Hosting via GigaOM
Update: Official Joyent Page
While I was concepting out the features for our Facebook App, I came up with a couple basic templates to use while designing for the platform. These help provide context to your designs so that you’re not working in a vacuum.
Facebook App Wireframe Templates v1
Feel free to contribute and help build a general library. Coming soon, Photoshop Templates.
It happens so fast in the tech world.
One day you’re the tech darling of the internets and then something comes down the pipes and steals all your shine. While this might seem like a bad thing, I assure you, it can only be good for Facebook and more importantly you the user.
Myspace is working on a platform. Friendster was even jumping into the game. These were newsbits from the last couple of weeks before the Open Social announcement. By themselves, they proved to be yawn fests and provided no reason for Facebook to start worrying.
Until Google threw out their bomb.
With the whole internet rallying together, you can be damn sure that Facebook is going to use their new cash investment from Microsoft and friends to come back swinging. That competition will force Facebook into improving their platform and site overall at an accelerated rate. Pressing issues and problems will be solved much faster and in turn will provide benefits to Facebook, Developers and you the user.
At the moment Google’s Open Social does not allow for people to port their Social Graph from network to network. Nor does it allow one universal login to all participating sites (ala OpenID). The important thing to note here is this will be the first step towards both of those goals.
Once you have all the major social networks and communities working together towards a single standard, you essentially have lowered a lot of the barriers of entries for a lot of these initiatives. I think its still a couple years out, but Open Social will provide a strong foundation for it to happen.
The Facebook Platform development team has been really busy, they’re constantly pushing updates and deprecating functions (sometimes with a weeks notice). After checking the updates I saw that they’re releasing FBML 1.2 which they’re testing at beta.facebook.com. I immediately jumped over and started clicking around, everything looked good until I stumbled upon an error page which actually looked damn good!
It looks like facebook has decided to start rendering the your server’s response to 500 errors directly in the canvas. I’m especially psyched about this because the django DEBUG screen is amazingly informative when debugging errors but was pretty much unusable before. Earlier, you had to ‘view source’ (still works) to get an idea of what your server was sending back during an error which got really old really quick but now on the beta site your app can tell you exactly what’s wrong with it.