TechCrunch has a story on a recently funded Facebook app which, frankly, seems stupid. Buying and selling ‘friends’ as ‘pets’. People have already sold me somehow on Facebook, and I just ignore it. I don’t get it. I thought MySpace was the place for stupid/flitty ideas, but it seems Facebook is moving in that direction, having grown their network to towering heights.
So, perhaps LinkedIn is the place to turn for apps with some sense, but I don’t see that you can write your own apps for LinkedIn, yet, anyway. Can you?
What I’d like to see is a time tracking/project tool with invoicing capabilities. This would turn LinkedIn or Facebook or whatever into a social business portal. Guru and ODesk and others seem to be doing OK with this, but you’re relying on people you’ve never met, with a race to the bottom in terms of price competition from overseas. If LinkedIn had a job/work type thing which would allow people to put out small chunks of work, the ability to find quality, recommended people from inside your own network would be huge. They already have a ‘jobs’ thing, but it’s pretty limited. Extending it to allow project tracking would rock. However, it’s probably outside of their core focus, and it may never happen.
Will someone be able to build something like this on top of Facebook instead of more stupid ‘zombie’ apps? Technically, probably yes, but I fear Facebook has devolved so much in to a place where professional stuff won’t ever take place on any real scale. Am I wrong?
see our facebook app:
http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=25463655312
this enables users to create service offers, post project requests and also professional requests, and bounce these to friends in their network and on to their friends. connected to destination site shortly to launch full functionality at “the web platform for outsourcing online work”. this is organised into 500 outsourcing categories in which offers and projects can be posted, and co-ordinated by category leaders and experts. the latter can both position themselves to handle larger outsourcing projects and earn substantial network management fees.
is this the sort of thing you are looking for?
Looks similar to what I was thinking, without having used it anyway. Certainly looks interesting. I don’t seen invoicing service in it. However, it looks like one of the more useful facebook apps I’ve seen over the last year, and I hope you are able to grow it in to something more widely used (and therefore exponentially more useful for everyone involved).
Thanks for the passing this along!