It was actually a pretty informative meeting as far as finding out more about Facebook's mission in creating the developer's platform and their stance on advertising and revenue generation by third party applications (and there was free beer and sushi courtesy of Facebook, which is always good). Basically, everything is wide open. Several issues and questions were brought up by attendees, the most interesting of which was whether or not Facebook's future plan includes developer access to group functionality that could produce more collaborative applications. The response from Dave Morin, Director of Platform at Facebook, who was available from San Francisco via video iChat, was sort of expected - that something was 'in the works' etc.

The interesting thing that came to my mind, particularly after reading this blog post by Marc Andreessen while riding the train home, which quite accurately addresses both the innovative nature of Facebook's decisions and possible problems moving forward, was how Facebook is going to maintain user satisfaction and platform consistency by addressing the problems that may arise from third party services whose servers are not up to the challenge of accommodating such a spike in users from Facebook. Maybe its enough to assume that most users will only add applications that have passed the test or that they won't be too discouraged if something doesn't work and will simply remove it, but I think that really remains to be seen, especially since, as Mark Zuckerberg (who stopped by for a question and answer session) stated, even Facebook itself did not anticipate such an incredible and fast response to their new platform. With some applications growing to 3 million users in just three weeks, it is unlikely that every developer will accurately be able to estimate user response.

Another interesting aspect of the meeting was an application demo by one of the founders and developers from Cruxy , an online service that allows users to share films, music and other forms of digital media in customizable flash players. Their application, which he stated took about a week to build, is scheduled for public release next week. He provided an interesting overview into the development process and problems they ran into along the way. The largest problem he reported was issues with allowing the widget inside a user's profile to update automatically without having to refresh the content. I imagine that this is a significant problem as I have seen many applications use the manual refresh method, including all of the flickr apps i have added and the del.icio.us app (not actually created by flickr or del.icio.us themselves). Perhaps laziness and the desire to just push an application out fast fueled this problem, but I think it was smart of cruxy to fix it before releasing. Now what I want to see is the killer music app! As I mentioned while talking to Amit Gupta, one of the organizers of the Meetup event, a killer music application is what Facebook may need to compete for users with Myspace. Personally, I think they should try to develop one themselves. As Mark Zuckerberg stated, they still are planning to develop their own applications in competition with applications developed outside the platform. On that note, the funniest response of the night came when someone asked Dave Morin if Facebook would have a problem with other social networks developing applications. His response, "We have no problem with that. We hope Myspace makes an app." It will never happen but the challenge has been thrown down nonetheless.