Want to watch the recording of this session? It’s available for free as a screencast to people working in universities or colleges at www.higheredexperts.com/highedwebdev
———————————————————————————————————-
Dimitri Glazkov, one of this year’s guest bloggers, covered the session about the Facebook Platform presented by Mike Richwalsky and Josh Tysiachney, the Allegheny College Web Team. This is Dimitri’s first post.
Presented by Mike Richwalsky and Josh Tysiachney from Allegheny College, this session was definitely a bleeding edge affair. Mike and Josh represent a small fraction of colleges that actually use Facebook. Not only that, they also build Facebook applications, and this, no doubt earns them the “reeeally early adopter” status. And thus, we probably should pay attention.
Mike gave a brief overview of the Facebook Platform, which is a pretty new offering, introduced in May 2007. The Platform has since taken the Silicon Valley by storm and now easily tops at 5000 apps, with 2000 of them having 100 or more users.
Josh eloquently outlined the advantages of Facebook over MySpace (which is soo 2006, if you haven’t yet been informed), touching on better organization, more structure and guidelines, and ahem… the development platform.
A good discussion on the merits of using Facebook (lots of good questions from the audience in the questions area) centered around whether and how an institution should approach Facebook. The answers are naturally, “yes” and “carefully”. Publicity using Facebook flyers and traditional media was also discussed.
The dynamic duo walked through steps of developing of a Facebook application (you can study those in more detail at
http://www.allegheny.edu/hewd), culminating with a _working_ demo of the two applications that they developed at Allegheny.
First one was feeding Athletic Headline News into your Facebook page, capitalizing on the existing RSS capability of the college site. Food for thought: this may be the lowest-hanging fruit with the greatest bang for the buck for you, dear reader.
But it was the second app that stole the show: the lolgator. Taking the lolcats to a whole new level, the lolgator allows you to create Impact-laden funnies with Allegheny’s loveable mascot as the backdrop — straight from your Facebook page! I don’t know about you, but I smell millions. Millions, I tell ya!
In all seriousness, the session was information, inspirational, well-rounded and I am sure spurred new ideas and concepts among the attendees. Perhaps we’ll see lolhawkeyes and lolblazers coming soon to the Facebook page near you.
