Before I get started on this quasi-tragic tale/diatribe, let me first welcome you to Nerds and Co., your one-stop-shop for things that probably shouldn’t matter.

That being said, I have a confession to make: I’m a developer of a Facebook application. More importantly, I’m the Lead Developer for Solvo Media, working on our Solvation software. So it’s with interest and perhaps even some envy that I first took interest in the Facebook Platform. The idea of placing massive amounts of security around so many millions or people’s private information, with the intent of opening that platform to third-party Internet developers to manipulate that data…well, it had horror-film written all of it.

Now, don’t get me wrong, the platform has been a massive success. Given that it’s goal was to get people to keep coming back, visiting lots of pages, and maybe clicking on lots of ads (or at least generating lots of ad-views), no one can deny that the opening of Facebook to applications certainly paid off. Hell, I just paid Facebook $20 to advertise on their site, my application, which is on their site. It’s a bit confounding, to say the least.

Nonetheless, developers, like all anonymous individuals on the Internet, are a seedy group of characters. Since Facebook first launched the platform in I believe May or June of ‘07, developers have found ways to frustrate users and generate, one assumes, at least a fair amount of revenue. I’m sure that Facebook wasn’t so naive that they thought there wouldn’t be problems, but developers certainly have thrown the Facebook team some interesting curve-balls.

From a practical business standpoint, the platform was designed to keep people coming back and active on the site. If all you did was have a profile and upload a few pictures and write on walls, the incentive to keep coming back regularly would be fairly slim. But, open up the system for a plethora of third party developers to create fun applications that keep people coming back at no cost to yourself? Genius!

That is, until your mailbox looks like this:

Hey! Join Top Friends!
Hey! Someone loves you! Add Spark!
Hey! Why not add another wall, with Fun Wall!
Hey! Why not add a third wall, with Super Wall!
Hey! Add iLike! We have an almost Apple-copyright-infringing name!
Hey! Add Compare People! You can compare people!
Hey! I need love, so add Hug Me and Hug Me!
Etc.
Etc.
Etc.

As if the massive amounts of invites wasn’t enough, applications were promising rich experiences and hiding them behind the invitation applet. These are your more insidious applications, where the user experience is forfeit to the potential for slight additional revenue. I’m looking at you Chainn, Inc., although you’re not alone.

For those who aren’t developers, the millions who merely use Facebook because, well, it’s Facebook, I want to make something very clear. Facebook understands you’re upset. Facebook understands that developers have taken advantage of the system. And while you, the viewer, generate the revenue that makes Zuckerberg rich, Facebook also understands that the developers are a crucial asset. Call it a catch-22. See, they want you to come back, again, and again, and again. They need the developers to create the applications that make the site interesting enough to garner repeat visits. So, they can’t very well piss off the developers for the sake of the average user.

As a Lead Developer and Project Manager, I’m delighted to follow this struggle. When your business model is to be the middle-man between users and the developers who don’t always care about the user, well, you have an exhaustive job ahead of you to strike that precious middle ground. So far I’d postulate that Facebook has done a fairly decent job, especially recently, in wrangling developers into being better team players, first by plea, then by direct platform restrictions.

For example, users don’t know this I’m sure, but how they react to invitations and emails will now affect how often applications can interact with users. This is, in my opinion, a great leap forward. Now, the user has the ability to determine for Facebook which developers deserve to have the right to spam their mailboxes.

For us developers who actually care about the user experience, we can’t wait to sit down with a big tub of popcorn and watch the unscrupulous developers go down, but the truth is, that day will likely never come.

Figures.