Lunch Shoppe

So I wrote a Facebook App and released it finally. It's called ithinkyourecute which was inspired by my friend Andrea. The idea behind it is simple. Say you are seeing someone and are interested in dating him or her, but you don't know whether to take it to the next level. This app hopes to help people with this predicament. If you mark someone as "cute" and in return that person marks you as "cute" then you know you are good to go. I wrote it in Ruby on Rails using the rfacebook gem which made it quite easy and only took a few hours. The hard part was design which I have no aptitude for. I am hosting it on Joyent Accelerator using ngnix and mongrel_cluster. I wanted to use Apache with mod_rails, but that didn't work out as I was constantly getting an error which I didn't have time to debug. I hope to eventually move it to that as it'd make deploying a whole lot easier, but I'm not complaining. The Joyent Accelerator I am using is a part of the free accelerator that is being given out to facebook developers so eventually I might go back to using Slicehost, but for right now it is fine.

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When Facebook released F8 it really was fate for it to release the Platform. The current problem right now with the Web 2.0 sphere is there are many small social networks that fill specific nitches, e.g. Flickr for photos, YouTube for videos, last.fm for music, etc. The problem here is people are not willing to grow those nitches since they are so many of them and this leads us to Facebooks first important release, News Feeds. News Feeds, although it felt stalkerish when it was first released it is something that lets people know what their friends are up to much easily. It is such an important aspect of Facebook now that it was a natural progression towards F8, the Facebook Platform. F8 basically lets other vendors build application to be used inside of facebook which lets the vendor tap into the growing number of facebook users. The benefits of this are twofold first application vendors can focus more on building the application and less on building community and secondly it gives them access to millions of users. So Facebook Platform is destined to become the next Yahoo as things start getting built on it. This is especially great for the vendors since Facebook basically said you can monitize in anyway you like i.e. put ads on your applications. However, the benefit is only there if they can keep the platform stable especially if there are a bunch of rogue applications about.

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