INetworkMarketing comments on our facebook app
Joshua from socialmarketingstrategy.blogspot.com has just written an interesting post on the current iteration of the facebook app that we’ve done for Fatface.
I pretty much agree with most of his comments (bizarrely as we built it), although it does seem a little aggressive. I thought this was a journo/blogger post at first, which is cool, but then I realised that Josh is competition - iNetworkMarketing. The floodgates are open, it’ll be interesting to blog about their applications. lol ;)
Originally the application was to send virtual accessories - hats, flasks, etc - new items from the fatface online store. Every day there were two winners of real product.
The whole process was very simple, to the point. The invite process, while probably not perfect from Josh’s point of view, was then, pretty spot on. With demographic profiling, i.e. showing just the females if the item was intended for females, etc.
It was originally a three week campaign, and worked very well, excellent feedback, fantastic penetration, happy client, etc - despite Facebook changing its api every other day and bringing in its new spam filter (and then subsequently realising that they’d made a mistake and changing it again…)
The current version, frankly, I can’t really argue with Josh too much on any front. It hasn’t worked as well for more reasons than he’s specified. Although there are other factors, I can’t really talk about them, let’s just say there are some things that just can’t be helped… :)
I’d be interested in Tom’s view on Josh’s technical observations in his second point.
Comments
Tom
said on 2 March 2008I’m sorry to hear Josh doesn’t like the application.
The comments regarding the navigation are certainly relevant in the current release because, unlike the Christmas Gift version of the application, there are multiple steps to sending a gift. The previous version worked as a single page and there was little or no navigation required. Consequently, it worked better.
You can get a better idea of how the single page style system worked by looking at a screen shot of the original Fat Face Christmas app at: http://ok-cool.com/posts/read/68-fat-face-and-ok-cool-say-christmas-is-for-giving/
Unfortunately, due to restrictions facebook placed on their invite process shortly after we started development of the application, it made it very difficult (read impossible) to send application invites from an iframe application. The choice was taken to build the app with an iframe rather than facebook fbml due to previous issues we’d had with our own musicwall application regarding timeouts. At the time, many developers were having similar application timeouts and we felt it was not acceptable to have these problems with a recognised brand such as fat face. Although opting for an iframe solution did ensure the smooth running of the application, it did limit us in some of the ‘facebook’ style functionality we could implement. It would seem this reliability issue with FBML applications has since been improved considerably and it’s possible we will switch future releases to this. Developing for facebook is both a rewarding and frustrating experience. Their API, whilst very feature rich, changes regularly as they try to balance the needs of their users and developers. I’ve previously blogged about this at http://ok-cool.com/posts/read/71-facebook-overlords/
I will look at the issue Josh highlights regarding clearing the selected friends and implement any necessary fix.
I wonder if Josh would be interested in my C.V for their current .NET/PHP position? ;)
Joshua March
said on 3 March 2008Hi Mark, Tom,
Thanks for your replies, it’s great to see such openness. I apologise if the post seemed aggressive - on a re-reading I agree with you and have changed some of the wording (put it down to Sunday morning grouchiness).
For the record, I do like the application idea - I just think it needs more work in the execution. Features like being able to track resolutions sent/accepted, seeing resolutions that friends have already received, etc, would all integrate the app further with users’ social graphs and improve the experience, although all this would require an FBML solution. It’s good to see that you’re aware of these issues and I look forward to seeing future versions. Let me know if you want any help, I’m available on a consultancy basis:)
Where are you guys based? Oh, and Tom - yeah, please send it over:)
Josh
Mark
said on 6 March 2008Josh, All Cool. :)
The problem with facebook, is, err, ummm, Facebook. :)
We’re down in sunny Bristol.
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