Another developer network

We had a great weekend for our daughter’s first birthday. My sister and her family were in town, the weather was mostly sunny, and everyone was healthy which when you have a child in pre-school is rare. Plus, the baby started walking a couple of weeks ago so she’s really cruising along now and finally able to wear the really cute dresses that were impractical when she was crawling, making for great photo opportunities.

It turns out that we didn’t need to take that much time off from work even with visitors because my sister and her husband kept falling asleep by 9pm every night. At first we kept waiting for them to come back upstairs after getting their kids to bed, but then we gave up and just went back to work, which was a good thing because Facebook made a major announcement.

Jason jumped on it and built a Ballhype widget for Facebook, pulling practically an all-nighter to get it listed as quickly as possible. Not surprisingly, many other developers spent the weekend mashing their apps with Facebook, so we’re not listed in the directory yet. The widget is live though, and we’ve posted about it on Ballhype. There are now dozens of Facebook users with the Ballhype widget — what’s the potential for growth here? I hardly dare to dream…

I used to be on the other side of the platform. My first job at Intuit was to help third-party developers access Intuit’s customers, mainly through the QuickBooks Solutions Marketplace. At the time, some people at Intuit held pretty strong opinions on whether opening up the QuickBooks API was a good thing, and how to treat developer products that were competitive with our own. It will be interesting to see what happens with the Facebook platform, this time from the other side of the network. So far it appears that their approach is to truly embrace the potential of an open platform.

Posted by Erin 29.May.07 Facebook Read more Comments (2)