Mike Griffiths

Facebook is a huge website that, unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last 3 years, you will have heard of. The original concept was simple; everyone has an account and can add pictures, users can then comment on other users profiles and pictures. This is the theory of social networking. It’s a very simple idea and a lot of sites have tried copying it, with not a lot of success.

More recently though the Facebook platform was released. This is essentially a framework that allows developers access to the data on Facebook, but of course the user has to agree to allow access to this data on a per-application basis.

There have been all sorts of success stories in the press about applications built on the framework so I thought I’d give it a go. I wanted something simple that would allow me to get knee deep into the framework straight away, but not cause me too much stress. I chose to create ‘football badges‘.

The idea is a simple one. The user adds the application and can select their favourite football team from a drop-down list (which is pulled from my database), this in turn will display that teams emblem / badge on that users profile page. Easy.

I have mixed opinions about the platform and it definitely needs a lot of work, but as a whole it is an excellent development medium and I’m sure there will be a lot of useful applications cropping up sooner rather than later.

As of writing my application had over 900 active users – which is quite impressive considering it’s only been live a week or so. Let’s hope it’s growth continues and I’m able to make at least some money from it! You can add the application from it’s ‘about page‘ on Facebook.

Football Badges Application – Add your teams badge to your profile