Wednesday, January 14, 2009

Created My First Facebook Application

If you build it, they will come. Yeah Right! Not in the world of Facebook. I thought it would be a neat idea if users could censor their photos in Facebook. It would help them either keep a dirty picture clean, protect the innocent, or even keep kids faces off the net.

Well, when I released the app, at least 250 other applications were released within 12 hours. I discovered 4 users had added the application within a couple of minutes of each other, then not much else. Just a couple of scraglers, who actually hit the next page link on the new application list. When I discovered that my app was listed and had very few adds, I decided to browse for my app. Page after page of 10 listings, and no Censor It! Where could it have gone? Finally, page 25, there it was.

Shameless link: Censor It

I even tried advertising the app through Facebooks ad program. That was pretty much a rip-off. I had about 4 people actually use it, but most just landed at my about page, and left. Sure, maybe it wasn't what they expected. But, I suspect that they were tricked into clicking the ads.

Well, yesterday, I put together a plain jane version of the Censor website and posted it here: http://censoryourphotos.com

Eh, maybe I'll see some hits, who knows?

Maybe if I'm bored, I'll post my trials and tribulations of actually getting a Facebook iFrame application up and running with C# and ASP.Net, 3.5 framework and the Facebook Toolkit 2.0. Code and All.