I saw this article over on CNET and couldn't agree more. There was a study done on Facebook and how most applications are pretty silly and pointless. It's true. There hasn't been a lot of useful applications that I've seen while there. Most are these little stupid games that have little to no depth. Worse yet, I've been getting spammed by a few of my friends with them and really want no part in utilizing any of these pieces of trash. Quite a few of these applications are nothing more than, "Share this stupid ugly little pet and spam him on your friend's profile!" Hopefully for the sake of the economy and society, none of these applications make any money.
That said, this does demonstrate some good news. One is that there's tons of potential for doing some serious application programming in using these platforms. Second, maybe it'll force these platforms to expand their feature set even more. Right now, if I have two complaints about things like OpenSocial and Facebook's API are that they're fairly limited and you cannot really build anything serious around them without a lot of tweaking.
I've got an application (the My List part) that I want to port to both platforms. However, in looking at the APIs, I kinda fear the amount of retrofitting that I'll need to do in order to make it work with those platforms. Naturally, using both platforms for the registered user base is a great scheme for avoiding to force users from registering yet another account. Still, I'm wondering how possible it is for this to occur.
Sphere: Related Content
Trackbacks: (Trackback URL)
