I been working on my first idea “What My Friends Like” Facebook app for the past few weeks. It searches all of the facebook friends and shows the most popular movies, music, and books from all of your friends. Facebook doesn’t have that kind of information and I thought it will be useful for users. It was also something small and doable that I could have done myself and release the first version(minimum viable product) in a few weeks. Since I was learning web development, and facebook API I wanted to start with something easy at first.
The first version I just used javascript with the facebook API, I used amazon widget to show the movies, music and books at amazon so that users can buy them if they want to. I get an affiliate fee if they do, that’s one way of monetizing the site. I created the site not to make money but more for getting recognition and “street credit”. If I can create an app by myself that a lot of people use and like then when I do some other idea it will be much easier to get people and investors behind me.
I will add additional features in the next few weeks like moving to php to keep save results and update the users when result change, cache results for instant showing, add more categories, filtering options for friends, mobile version, … There are a lot of things that could be done with the app the question is how much time should I spend on working on it. Should I focus on this app and see how far I can take it, perhaps it could be app that every user has which shows their friends info and its something they can’t live without? Or should I stop once I see that no one is using it and move to other ideas?
Share It
