Facebook apps: this month's must-have

At Wednesday night's Facebook Developer Meetup in New York, the mood could be summed up by the appearance of a clean-cut young entrepreneur who had written 'I NEED AN APP' in thick black marker on his name tag.

His Web endeavour hadn't even gone live yet, but he knew he wanted -- even needed -- to be able to build an application for it using Facebook Platform, the set of tools the popular social-networking site released last month.

Now that third-party companies and developers can create custom applications for Facebook members to add to their profiles, building 'Facebook apps' has become a top priority for many Web companies -- particularly smaller ones looking to make it big by capitalising on Facebook's large and loyal user base.

"It's an amazing platform," said Nathan Freitas, creator of Cruxy, a set of tools that help musicians and filmmakers share and sell their digital content. "It's fantastic. They really thought of so many things, and it's a pleasure to develop for, honestly."

Less than a month after its debut, however, Facebook Platform may be closing in on a saturation point. Dave Morin, Facebook's director of platform, told the Developer Meetup audience via videoconference that more than 40,000 developers have requested to be part of the project, around 1,500 applications have been produced so far, and some of the most popular went from zero to 850,000 users in three days. "This is unprecedented in the history of the Internet," Morin said to the developers.

"I definitely think that people are initially going to run into 'app fatigue'," said Amit Gupta, who hosted the developer event on Wednesday night. Gupta has created a Facebook Platform application for his photography tips newsletter, Photojojo. "I think I've started to see that already with some of the people in my circle," he added.

But in an interview with CNET.co.uk's sister site News.com after the developer conference, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg (who dropped in unexpectedly at the event) said though some users might find the third-party applications distracting or disruptive, they're central to Facebook's overall philosophy of letting users build the site from the ground up.

"If you think about just how we went about building the site," Zuckerberg said, "the traditional approach would have been to assemble the information and build the directory ourselves" -- like a phone book. Instead, Facebook allowed people to opt into membership and build their own profiles. "In general, we really want to make this as decentralised as possible," he added. "Decentralised systems just tend to be more efficient."

That does raise another potential risk for Facebook: losing control. "There are a lot of things we're going to have to deal with as they come up," Zuckerberg said, while adding that no major problems had surfaced yet. He pointed out that the terms of service for Facebook Platform are the same as those for standard use of the site: no pornography, spamming, harassment or copyright violations, among other unsavoury things. While Zuckerberg has touted the openness of Facebook Platform, he's also quick to note that plenty of regulations are in place to keep tabs on developer activity.

As an example, Zuckerberg said Facebook Platform developers cannot yet use Javascript in their applications, because it isn't seen as secure enough for the platform in its current form. "Rather than putting it in our terms of service that you promise not to breach our security and putting the onus on us," he said, "we are just going to open it up slowly over time."