Barney Pell's Weblog

Facebook Platform is a brilliant idea by the folks at Facebook to provide strong support for developers to create new applications on top of Facebook, both extending the functionality for Facebook users and lowering the barriers to create entirely new applications that leverage the technology and social data that make Facebook itself so useful and powerful.

Social networks pose new social etiquette problems. Services like MySpace and Facebook make it very easy to request people to be your friends and there is high social motivation to generate large lists of friends so you feel popular. But having accepted many friends, it is easy to get swamped with viral marketing emails and invites to use new countless new applications. Moreover, having someone on your friend list makes a public statement that you are actually friends with them (more or less).

To address this, services like Facebook make it possible to remove someone as your friend. However, the dynamics of deletion can be quite dramatic, so for social engineering reasons, the systems notify users only when someone has added them as a friend -- no alerts or messages are sent when someone removes you as a friend. Thus a user has no easy way to find out if one of their "friends" has actually removed them. You can keep track of your friend count and try to remember who is no longer on your list, or periodically check your friends profile pages to see if you are still there, but all these approaches are generally frustrating and unmanageable. In thinking about this, I had an idea: to make an application that could tell you automatically when someone has removed you as a friend on a social networking service.

I was discussing this yesterday with Siqi Chen, a friend and colleague who recently left Powerset after his startup company, Fluid Play, received seed funding from YCombinator. Siqi is a strong engineer who is great with Ruby on Rails (he was a key developer on PowerLabs), and his new company specializes in building Facebook applications. Fluid Play already has several highly successful Facebook applications, including "Friends for Sale", which lets you "buy" friends on Facebook and send messages to other friends pretending they are doing your bidding. In the 4 weeks since "Friends for Sale" has been out, it has already generated over 450,000 users!

Siqi thought it would be a fun and straightforward project to implement my "Unfriender" application idea on the Facebook platform, and I was curious to learn about application development on the Facebook platform in general. So we got together on Saturday afternoon for a hack session (since I'm not a Ruby on Rails programmer, this generally means I get to kibitz and "product manage" as Siqi does all the programming work...). As a testament of the power of Facebook Platform and Siqi's coding prowess, we had the application built from scratch, debugged, and deployed in production within 8 hours wall-clock time.