So what is this field all about? It's about capturing/discovering/mapping the social graph, and then providing (hopefully useful) services through that. One irritation: you have to enter this data over and over again (and transmit that pain to all your friends) for each new service. There are solutions to that problem, but - as Scoble has demonstrated - these are controversial).
This all depends on the API provided by the platform, and at the moment there's Facebook and Open Social (Google and partners). Bebo has adopted the Facebook API, so it seems to be the more relevant right now.
Key things to remember about your Facebook (et. al.) application:
- Runs on your server
- communicates with the service via a set of HTTP APIs
Facebook has a fairly clean API and set of "Facebook tags" (FBML) that you get access to. The presentation just went to a demo on that.
Now I'm getting into the whole "back channel at the conference" thing :) - Jane Chandler (one of the attendees) sent along a set of useful links that cover some of this ground:
It's fairly easy to publish an app - promoting it is a whole different ballgame, and will (or won't) get adopted on its own merits. There's also a separate platform for mobile devices, a data store API, and a new API for Facebook pages. Revenue model: advertising with shared revenue (Facebook's terms). Will it broaden to more traditional business applications? Not clear yet, but the thinking seems to be yes-ish. Possibilities? Combination of location data from mobiles and social graph data from the service.
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