Why Common Kitchen on Facebook?
Yesterday I laid out the basics of our little starter Facebook application. What I didn’t do was explain why, given all the other things we have on our to-do list and the myriad details involved in staying in business, we took a day out to throw together a Facebook application.
As with anything, there are a lot of reasons. Certainly one of them is that Facebook is the darling of Silicon Valley this year; something happened this summer, and suddenly all kinds of people over the age of 27 have been signing up. (At 33, I think when I first signed up I was more than a standard deviation away from the mean age on the site. If that was ever true, it isn’t any more; in the past few weeks I’ve had several friends from my high school and college days add me to their networks.) If there’s one way to get by the “Cold Start Problem” I alluded to the other week, it’s getting your application in front of the millions of Facebook users.
It’s tempting to take Facebook at their word and use them as a baseline social network–to let Facebook handle all the “social networking” features, and just build on the networks and users they’ve already created. The problem there is that really using the information inherent in the network is only possible if Facebook is collecting the kind of network information we need. (This is not a problem for Common Kitchen, but it could be for others.) A related problem, going the other way: what kind of privacy implications would that have? When users add Facebook applications now, they pretty much give the application permission to see all the information they’ve added to Facebook. 90% of the time that’s harmless, but who wants to find the other 10%? Let’s dig up a different reason.
If we’re going to be useful to our readers, we need to keep them up to date about what’s happening in their network on our site. The feeds we launched this week are one step in that direction; the Facebook application, as it works so far, is another. Not everyone follows feeds, but if the information from a feed is also turning up on Facebook (which, as the comic above notes, plenty of people do follow regularly) the same purpose is served. And if that brings people back to our site more often, because they know there’s something for them here, then we’re both happy: we build a more useful application, and our users benefit more from it.
Finally, there’s the “toe in the water” reasoning. That goes like this: we certainly don’t give anything up by creating this application. And yet we may be able to take advantage of a really good opportunity later if we’re already there. So why not give it a try and see where it goes?
I don’t think any of these are single reasons why we built the Common Kitchen Facebook application, but it’s fair to say they’re all among the reasons it exists.
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