August 08, 2007
The Supremes and later Vanilla Fudge sent this song line reverberating through the sixties and seventies. It tells about a personal struggle whether to hang on to or set free a love interest.
In the Facebook culture, the term ‘hanging on’ can mean an entirely different thing to Facebook application owners.
Facebook provides a shell environment (too simplistic an analogy but it will do) and a markup language (FBML) so that applications can live and thrive within the Facebook environment. Facebook provides the means to do data lookups against Facebook’s facilities (e.g. user profiles, photos, friend relationships etc.) and exploit the viral nature of Facebook’s “social graph” , as founder Mark Zuckerberg likes to call it.
However, a great deal of the resources necessary to deliver a high performing application (e.g. disk space, databases, server processing capacity etc.) are the responsibility of the application developer/owner. In the early days of launching a Facebook application all will be well as a few dozen, then a few hundred Facebook users add the application and start using it. Pride will soar. The application owner will sing the praises of all who had a part in getting to this point.
Then, when its popularity (i.e. active user numbers) reaches tens or hundreds of thousands, server capacity (perhaps many high performing servers with considerable disk space etc.) must be added by the application owner to service the demand. This is one of the prices of success in the web world and sobering evidence that application popularity is a double edged sword. To feed the demand, considerable investment in infrastructure and potentially human resources to administer the application is usually necessary …. all of this before you have made a single dime from the application!
To give up now and take down the application is to throw away huge potential in terms of revenue, not to mention pride. To invest further has its risks, but seems the logical thing to do.
Ahhh…. a conundrum of Facebook proportions!
Popularity: 92% [?]
