SubscribeThe Stanford Facebook Class – Creating Engaging Facebook Apps
Published by cornelius on Saturday, December 1st, 2007 in Technology.Tags: f8, facebbok application platform, facebook
At Stanford University they offer a course, Creating Engaging Facebook Apps, where students create in small teams their own Facebook applications. The goal is to recognize the underlying fundamentals of successful applications that utilize the Facebook application platform. Success is measured by the number of persons using an application, so word-of-mouth effects play an important role to reach a large user base. The key is to develop simple and interactive applications like KissMe to send virtual kisses or Dodgeball to play a virtual Dodgeball game on Facebook. Over two dozens other examples are mentioned on the course page.
But why is it necessary or useful to offer such a project at a university?
“Facebook is a Persuasive Technology”
“In 2007 the most effective persuasive technology has been Facebook. People in our lab have researched persuasive technology since 1993, and we’ve found the fastest path to insight is studying what’s working best in the real world. Today’s Facebook experience has so many elements of persuasion, so we’ve decided to dive in deep. Our goal is to understand the psychology of Facebook.” Citation from the course page.
It is definitely an interesting hands-on course that shows the entrepreneurial spirit at Stanford and the demand to really set the cornerstones for the next big things on the Internet. Setting such a focus on Facebook, a regular commercial company, goes in my opinion one step too far for a course at a university but they want to update the course to “Create Engaging Web Applications Using Metrics and Learning on Facebook” which is a little less direct. They also have to react on the Open Social announcement and the fact that there is now another widget platform to analyze.
Definitely an interesting course that I wish I could take at my university.
- Stanford Students Present Facebook Apps to Class @ TechCrunch
- Stanford’s Facebook Developers show applications @ VentureBeat
- Public Facebook Group of this class with notes and updates
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December 2nd, 2007 at 1:33 am
[...] The Stanford Facebook Class – Creating Engaging Facebook AppsBy corneliusThe key is to develop simple and interactive applications like KissMe to send virtual kisses or Dodgeball to play a virtual Dodgeball game on Facebook. Over two dozens other examples are mentioned on the course page. …Cornelius’ Entrepreneurial Thoughts – http://cornelius-rabsch.de/blog [...]