In May 2007, at the Facebook F8 event, Facebook launched its application platform and announced a slew of third party developers. Since then Facebook has the Web's "App De Jour". By courting developers, rather than fretting over third party widgets (like MySpace), the flood of new Facebook applications has accelerated the social network’s already runaway growth, contributing to 37% of Facebook’s growth since the platform was opened in May.

The success of Facebook has promoted a growing number of application, service and content providers to include Facebook apps as part of their marketing and product mix. In fact, Facebook application design and development has become the most requested service here at Metablocks. We have found, however, that even more important then building Facebook apps is understanding how to strategically design and deploy social media applications (including widgets) to achieve a client’s business goals. Social media applications do not exist in a vacuum, and can have one or more of the following objectives:

• To promote a service by serving a “viral marketing” function and getting the word out or creating brand awareness
• To extend a service’s feature set or functionality by enabling its use within social networks
• To add to or extend the collaborative or community aspect of a service by leveraging the relationships users have on social networks
• To provide application functionality or utility that currently doesn’t exist on a social network or is significantly better than what currently exists

I also like the way Leveraging Ideas categories Facebook apps into their 3 categories:

• Facebook apps that exposes a company's content to an audience
• Facebook apps designed to gain as many users as quickly as possible
• Facebook apps that create something that provides users with true value

Regardless of how you wish to categorize social media applications, content and service providers need to understand that social media development strategy is just as important as social media application development. Even before Metablocks got into the business of developing Facebook and other social media applications, many of our widget development projects included a social media strategy component to help clients understand how widgets, gadgets, blogs, wikis, and social networks worked together as part of a comprehensive social media strategy. I always continue to stress to clients that they need a viable social media strategy and not just a Facebook app or widget!