What's next, Facebook?

While social networking sites
have grown colossally, there
have been major changes in
the way that people use them because
of the continuous improvements that
these sites carry out. Recently, Facebook
launched a developer contest in India
and also participated in the July edition
of Proto.in, the Indian developer garage.
Ruchi Sanghvi, Facebook Platform
Product Manager, was visiting India for
this event, before which we met up
with her to chat about how Facebook
is redefi ning Internet experiences
through innovations in web services. Our
conversation revolved mainly around
which type of applications should be
expected from this contest and we also
discussed some of the existing ones.
What's the contest about?
Essentially we want to invest in the
developer community in India and the
application development contest is our
way of doing that. India has one of the
largest developer communities and we’re
inviting them to develop two kinds of
applications. One is platform applications
that live within the Facebook website.
One example of such applications is
games such as poker. There are a lot
more utilities and social applications such
as navigation for movies then there’s
one where you can book concert tickets.
The other kind of application is Connect
integration, where you can actually pull
the social content and a user’s identity
within a website.
What’s in it for Facebook?
We believe that Facebook by itself is
not going to be able to build every
single application or tool that users
need for communication. The best thing
a company can do is to enrich the user
experience itself, which is why we built a
platform and provide APIs to developers.
For example in India someone could
build an application which is locally and
culturally relevant, that Indian users
would appreciate. Our interests are
mutually aligned because not only are
we distributing traffi c to them but we
are also increasing engagements on our
own site.
Tell us a little about ‘Causes’?
‘Causes’ has millions of users and
it’s a very interesting concept. It’s a
grassroots movement to organize people
to contribute to social causes. Grassroots
contributions are really important and
if you think about campaigns like the
ones in the United States, like Obama’s
campaign was funded at a grassroots
level. I don’t think that a lot of people
have tapped into that and Causes
enables it and uses Facebook as a
platform, a social tool to make that more
viral. There are a lot of such examples
where users are involved and developers
are making tools and applications to
enable such interactions.
Let’s talk about Connect
Connect can be utilized on the desktop,
Xboxes and other gaming consoles. Even
mobile devices can leverage Connect
across all platforms. Users have an
identity on Facebook, they identify their
friends, interests and so on, and they
even have their contact information. If
you want to take your identity to any
website, application or device, we let
the user do that. In traditional software
development, when you go to a site,
you register, enter the details and repeat
the process every time you use a new
application. But with Connect, the user
can take control of the identity with a
click of a button, and that by itself is
really powerful.
What are you expecting from this
contest?
Though there are guidelines attached
with the documentation that comes along
with the APIs and our policies of how to
create the best user experience, I can’t
even begin to imagine what people can
do with technology and how exciting it
can be! There are so many things that
developers can create when they have
an open and free platform. Regarding
the various verticals or categories in
which these applications will fall, it’s
not that one type of application is
considered important over the other. It’s
just that how well you can build it and
how much potential will it actually have.
For instance, you could build applications
in Hindi and I don’t think any other
networking site has that yet. Be it any
application, whether for entertainment,
utility, sharing information in different
ways, games, all of them are valuable.
What’s the most striking point of
the platform to you?
The platform is a set of APIs which
allows the applications to be more
social, get users’ identity, inputs and
information, and also distributes the
content back on Facebook. Thereafter
this information gets distributed to the
users’ friends and they then fi nd out
about the application. So it’s a whole
viral and organic mechanism.