<< Prev – SharePoint and Facebook – Part 1 (a preamble)
There was a great discussion I was listening to the other week on a favorite national radio station of mine. The discussion was centred around the affect of the economic crisis on Australia’s software development industry.
In recent times, two major Australian game developers have shut up shop as a result of the recent crisis. At the other end of the market, smaller teams of developers are thriving, fed by a range of well written frameworks on which to develop rich, lightweight and engaging applications upon, including:
- iPod/iPhone/iTouch (Objective-C/Cocoa)
- Facebook (PHP); and
- SharePoint 2007 (.NET WSS 3.0)
The iPhone is a great example of a platform that has seen a surge in development. The demand for the applications is massive with over 930 million iPhone application downloads* via the iTunes app store alone since its inception.
Facebook has also seen a large growth in application development, with more than 52,000 applications currently available in the Facebook Application Directory (Facebook, 2009).
Unfortunately well written frameworks do not always deliver great applications. In fact it is quite the opposite, as great frameworks allow entry level developers to easily enter the market, flooding it with simple yet uninspiring applications. The result is the tireless sifting through loads of applications to find ones that are of any use. Facebook statistics reflect this trend with only 5,000 applications having 10,000 or more monthly active users, bearing in mind that 100 million users log in to Facebook on a daily basis.
Some have risen to the top with over 15 million monthly active users:
Lets examine the common facets of these applications and relate it to how developers should be thinking when designing their next SharePoint solution to avoid being the next failing SharePoint application…
Next: SharePoint 2007 and Facebook – Applications – ‘Causes’ >>
* as of 11 April 2009, obtained via the iTunes Application Store.
- Statistics | Facebook, http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics, accessed on 11 April 2009
Tags: Applications, Design, Facebook, MOSS 2007, Solutions
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I’m quite pleased with the infomatiron in this one. TY!
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