Mike-O-Matic

I’m in a weird mood tonight, and I think this post might reflect it.

For the past few weeks I’ve been working with my friend Bret out in San Francisco on a series of applications for the Facebook platform. From what he tells me it is the skill to have if you want to land a job out in the Bay Area, which I may want to do in the not-to-distant future. So I sucked it up and learned the API. And you know what?

It isn’t that bad.

Facebook apps are like regular web apps, but with a few slight modifications.

1. In the most common form, they are limited to running inside a panel in Facebook. This means you have a few design constraints to work within, which is both limiting (”I hate blue designs!”) and liberating (”Well, let’s see what I can make of this crappy blue design.”)
2. The apps are just a series of POSTs. The user clicks through your app on Facebook’s servers, which in turn shoots HTTP POSTs to your server to get matching content. You parse the POST to get session and user information, and to determine the state within your app.
3. The API, while generally complete, does feel a little like it was designed by college kids convinced of their own cleverness. There are a bunch of weird concepts floating around (”permanent session keys?” Huh?) and the inter-relationships between what is POSTed to you, FBML (Facebook’s convenient XHTML additions), FQL (the query language), and the REST API are somewhat unclear and take some tinkering to figure out. Also, the documentation isn’t as complete as it could be.

So what makes Facebook apps so interesting? I think it comes down to two things:

1. The service has millions of people on it.
2. The API lets you spam them with news feed stories, requests, and profile widgets.

I’ll be honest with you, I don’t use the service much at all. I graduated from college a long time before it came into being and never feel entirely comfortable with giving my personal information to websites anyway, nevermind the login information to all of my email accounts. Still, there is a demographic out there that does do all of this stuff, and it seems to get bigger all of the time. Facebook app builders want to get in front of this group and build up their user stats.

Now, A Rant

There is a perception in the Interweb that where there is smoke, there must be fire. Although nobody understands exactly what makes a particular idea (or implementation of an idea) take off virally, they do know that advertisers or larger companies will pay good money to get in front of those eyeballs. Often the “good” sites are only known in retrospect, since they are the ones that, ya know, survived. It doesn’t matter if the actual service offered by the site is any good, or if it has a viable business built around its core service. Or a value proposition more complicated than “use us, your friends do!” Traffic is validation, and it is certainly valuation.

This makes me sad.

I believe in an objective good. A Platonic Ideal. The feeling a coder gets when they build a product and every single object and API lines up just so. Every parameter has a value passed in. And I don’t believe I need someone else (or 10,000,000 other people) to tell me it is so. I just know it.

There is a danger in gauging a product or site’s quality based solely on how many people use it. Not a danger as in “the world will end.” It’s as if we just decided to get rid of classical music because Justin Timberlake sells so many more albums. Forsaking art for pap. Replacing a lifetime of work studying the intricacies of an instrument for “Dick in a Box.”

Unfortunately, I don’t think many other people share my sentiment. They like numbers, and winners, and things that are easy to quantify. Even people who understand quality sink to the lowest common denominator when confronted with opposition. Take Apple fans, for instance.

Apple laptops are simply better than Dell laptops. They are beautiful, have faultless lines and are made of quality metal. The keyboards light up in the dark, the trackpad includes infinitely useful multitouch gestures, and even the damn electrical plug is held in with magnets, so if you trip over it, your computer doesn’t fall off the table. They thought of everything. With each MacBook generation, virtually nothing changes aesthetically on the computer; it just gets more and more refined. Dells are rickety and plastic, with ugly wall wart plugs. They have holes all over them where you can stick various attachments. Last I saw, they had bulky CD/DVD trays that shoot out the side when you click eject. And they are so damn noisy.

Yet, when a Dell user brings up the fact that Dell sells many more laptops than Apple, many Apple users retort with something about how the installed base is actually higher because people keep their Mac longer. Come on! All they should do is laugh a little, show a knowing grin, and walk away. The lure of getting caught up in a number argument is too great, because quality is impossible to measure.

Conclusion

So now I have built Facebook apps, and am glad I had the experience. I also feel slightly evil, like I have contributed to the cacophony rather than made the world a prettier place. Strange, that.

Til next time.

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