Web 2.0 Warning: Don't Put All Your Facebook Apps In One BasketWeb 2.0 Warning: Don't Put All Your Facebook Apps In One Basket

Here's a lesson I learned, painfully: Be careful which Web 2.0 providers you get in bed with, because the software underpinning you're relying on today to help you do the next big thing could be turned off tomorrow when the company realizes it's got to focus its efforts elsewhere, like maybe to snare some of that elusive stuff called revenue.That's precisely what happened to me. In January of 2008, I was a minor hero of sorts around here for building information's first Facebook apps. As I described in a post at the time, the apps pulled headlines and blurbs out of the RSS feeds for information's and Bmighty.com's news and blog posts, and presented them inside a Facebook wrapper. (There was also an app which listed the latest white papers from the TechWeb Digital Library.)

You can see a photo of one of the apps below; OK, so they were basically glorified RSS feeds, but they were legitimate Facebook apps, as legit (if not more so) than numerous other offerings cluttering up the social network.

I constructed all five apps using a cool tool called App Maker Lite from Dapper.net. App Maker Lite was a Web-based tool which walked you through the process of creating a widget out of RSS or XML feeds.

Sure, there were some software smarts involved, but these mainly revolved around entering the correct call-back URLs into Facebook, and also grappling with the API and "secret" keys required by Facebook to activate the apps. Those things are actually simple to do if you're simpatico with computers. At the same time, they're hard to explain to people who have never written any code at all.

Like many things in life, the important part is not how you did something or what it took to do it, but simply that you did it. So, while as a technical type I was slightly embarrassed at the seeming simplicity of the apps, I was gratified that users seemed to like them. As proof of this, the information Weblog Update at one point had 1,500 users.

Now, you know where this story is headed -- you never get something for nothing. In December, I had problems when the apps fritzed out on me and resisted any sort of fix until I'd done a lengthy back and forth with Dapper.net support. They worked for a bit, but I recently found out they were completely dead.

When I went to investigate, I found out the reason they no longer work is that the company had pulled the plug on App Maker Lite. (Technically, has Dapper.net posted a notice saying App Maker Lite is not supporting new apps, and that existing ones will continue to update. But mine no longer work.)

However, I'm not complaining about what Dapper.net has done here, because I really have no right to. They did what they had to do to support their business. According to their Web site, the company is now focused around Web 2.0 advertising opportunities. (Something about offering the ability to match ads to the right consumer via something called "targeting through pre-contextualization.")

When you get right down to it, I was looking for a shortcut (an easy App Maker, you could say). Rather than doing the hard work of creating and hosting my own PHP code (or whatever script I had settled on), I opted for a free and easy widget. Which was kind of dumb, in retrospect, because my apps weren't that difficult. They were simple RSS feeds, pulled into a wrapper to appear on Facebook.

At the same time, what I did was nothing different from what thousands of other FB developers have done. (And, honestly, I'd do it all over again.) If you've spent any time at all on the Facebook developer wiki and forums, you know that the social-network's software ecosystem is a rapidly shifting universe, to say the least. There are no certainties to hold onto, and so the imperative is to do quick and dirty apps, to push them out, see what work, and move on to the next one.

Indeed, I'm still on developer crack, of sorts, because once I found out that App Maker Lite had left me, my first thought was to find some other widget to port my apps over to. (I've been looking at Widgetbox, although that seems to be Twitter- and YouTube-focused, not Facebook.)

I wish I had time to build my apps properly, and go through a proper development cycle in which I could conceptualize, determine requirements, poll users, create wireframes, write pseudo-code, do a software review, test, integrate, shake, bake, and regurgitate. However, even real IT types don't have the luxury of working like this anymore. Plus, I've got a day job.

Are you developing Facebook apps? Tell me about your experiences, by leaving a comment below or e-mailing me directly at [email protected].

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Alex Wolfe is editor-in-chief of information.com.