ITGumbo: spicing IT up

What about Facebook apps? Eze Vidra's latest blog post highlights the Israeli Facebook application, Save an Alien and what a great idea it is. The premise of the application is that in May 2008, a meteor is going to strike an alien planet and destroy its population of 10 million unless 10 million Facebook users adopt one alien each. Since one person can save only one alien, should all 10 million aliens be saved, the company behind the app will have collected personal information from 10 million Facebook users, giving the company a lot of potential for targeting marketing.

After reading about the application, I decided to google Save an Alien, and found several links relating to the application as well as links about people's frustrations with the overwhelming amount of Facebook applications and the clutter it creates on personal profile pages (which takes away from a positive user experience). Since Facebook opened its platform in May, developers have created over 6,000 applications for it and it is constantly in news articles and all over blogs. As readers of Michael Arrington's blog on TechCrunch have commented, Facebook is not the be all and end all of the Internet; though it often feels that way.

The questions lying ahead for Save an Alien and other Israeli Facebook-only applications to ask themselves are how can we make a presence on Facebook that will support a viable business model and at what point should we expand or continue to engage our target market on platforms other than Facebook? After all, if companies seek funding, won't they need to show some additional backbone should Facebook popularity fade in the near future?