So Many Facebook Apps, So Little Time

by Andy Carvin, 1:16PM

In recent months, there’s been a surge in interest regarding the social networking site Facebook. Much of the attention is due to Facebook’s decision to allow any user to create their own software applications that can run inside the social network. It’s led to a lot of buzz and probably a whole slew of new Facebook members, but might there be an educational benefit as well?

For those of you who aren’t familiar with Facebook, it was launched in 2005 by a Harvard student who wanted to create an online community where fellow classmates could create profiles of themselves and interact with each other. The desire to have a social networking space for Harvard students was hardly unique to that particular university, so it didn’t take long for Facebook to evolve into an umbrella community containing networks for other campuses across the country. Meanwhile, businesses started setting up their own Facebook networks for employees. Before long, Facebook grew into one of the largest social networks on the Internet.

Over the last year or so, two factors have contributed to Facebook’s growth spurt. First, they changed the rules regarding who could join the community. Initially, only people with university-affiliated email addresses could register, or employees of companies that had partnered with Facebook. But Facebook then threw the gates wide open, allowing anyone to register, even if they weren’t affiliated with a partnering university or company.

Second, they opened up Facebook to third-party software applications as well. Before this change, Facebook was like most other social networks in the sense that when you used the website, you were limited to the tools built specifically for it. For example, Facebook would let you create a user profile, form your own discussion goup, post pictures and videos, etc, but if you wanted to do anything beyond those functionalities, you were out of luck. All of this changed when Facebook announced that any Facebook user could install their own software that would run inside of the social network. This may not seem like a big deal, but it’s actually revolutionary. For one thing, anyone with a good idea and a bit of coding skills could now create applications that could be used and shared by millions of Facebook members. It also meant that Facebook was positioning itself as the ultimate social networking portal. Why go to a dozen other community websites you were using previously when all the activities you did at each of those sites could now run inside Facebook?

Currently, there are more than 4,000 applications, or “apps,” available in Facebook. Some of them are simply tools for importing content from other online services. For example, on my Facebook page I use apps that import summaries of my blog posts, my latest videos, text messages I’ve sent using Twitter, and my latest photos from Flickr. This helps visitors to my Facebook page browse content of mine from multiple sources without having to bounce from one website to another. I also use other user-generated Facebook apps for activities such as plotting out my travels on a world map, showing lists of movies I’ve rated or reviewed, and questions that I’ve posed to other Facebook members.

Some of the most interesting Facebook apps connect people directly with each other around a particular issue or activity. For example, the app known as Causes allows users to create charitable fundraising campaigns and recruit other participants. Another app, Lending Club, lets Facebook users borrow and lend money to each other. In its first four months, this app generated more than $500,000 in person-to-person loans, many of which were for amounts so small that a bank would have never gotten involved in the transaction.

Given the thousands of apps that have been created since Facebook invited users to do so earlier this year, you would think that a number of education-related apps might have been developed as well. There are over 300 apps categorized under education on the website, but the list is very underwhelming. A lot of the apps labeled as educational include things like quote-of-the-day generators, tools for displaying lists of your favorite books and opportunities to rate your teachers. There are a few apps that serve as markets for buying and selling term papers as well - sorry, but don’t expect me to provide links for those. A number of university libraries have created apps to allow students to search their collections from their Facebook pages, like Ryerson University. And there are tons of apps that have no apparent relationship to education by any stretch of the imagination, like horoscope apps.

One of the most popular types of apps is related to displaying class schedules. For example, Jake Jarvis’ Courses app lets students list the classes their taking, meet up with classmates and discuss the course. Students might use these tools for discussing coursework, but there’s nothing stopping them from using them for non-educational purposes.

Other Facebook apps include quiz tools that let users post questions and polls to fellow community members; collaborative story apps in which one person writes a sentence or paragraph to a story then has someone else pick it up from there; even bibliography generators that let you plug in the basic information about a source you’re citing, then automatically format into a variety of standard bibliographic styles. All of these tools have their use, but they’re not exactly unique or transformative. In many cases, Facebook apps are merely ways of bringing the functionality of another website into Facebook, which may be convenient, but of limited educational value beyond that.

In some ways, it’s a bit surprising that there aren’t more useful educational apps within Facebook, given how ubiquitous the website is on college campuses. Given all the creative energy put into apps that allow you to pretend you’re a vampire or see how many degrees of separation you have from other people, you would think that a small number of apps might have been created for educational purposes. Granted, Facebook apps aren’t even a year old yet, so maybe I’m expecting too much, too soon. And the Facebook site doesn’t make it easy to identify cool tools that are underutilized, as apps are generally listed in terms of popularity.

There may be some hope, though. This fall, Stanford is offering a course on Facebook apps, though there’s no guarantee that students will create apps that are particularly useful for students and educators. Meanwhile, there’s a lot of work going on to make it easier for non-techies to create their own apps, which hopefully lead to some interesting developments.

What about you? Have you seen any Facebook apps that might be useful to either students or educators? Does any of this matter, since social networking sites like Facebook are often blocked by filters? Or is that a moot point, since students and teachers can access Facebook off-campus and still take advantage of it? -andy

Filed under : Social Networking