Facebook App Ideas

The recently announced funding for facebook application development has got me thinking. There's a lot of money at stake. It's not so much about money as it is about being something exciting and ground breaking.

Here are a couple ideas:

1) Wikipedia History - this is kind of just for fun. i browse wikipedia often. when i do i end up getting lost in its hyperlinks, it really is a trip. when i feel satisfied or get tired (one or the other) i wake up and wonder, where have i been? this would somehow represent my wikipedia browsing, this is where you could get creative. somehow communicating the time spent on certain topics could be interesting.

so on its own is one thing. but combined with the socialness of facebook you get the immediate satisfaction of knowing that you're sharing this information with your friends. you could even take it a step further so that algorithms find similarities amongst friends research interests.

a model for this type of application already exists in the work happening at the Attention Trust. This would essentially be an Attention Trust recorder made specifically for wikipedia and accessible via facebook.

2) Project Management Tools - here's where you could make some big bucks. why not build project management right into facebook? "pm" services are where a lot of the best innovation and use of the web has been coming from (Basecamp, Zoho, etc.). combine that with another key player in internet innovation (fb) and how could you go wrong?

think of it as fb groups with extra features (document posting, etc.) fb groups may already have enough functionality that it could compete with existing pm services. a feature comparison could be warranted.

most of the already existing services cost money. building their features (assuming they're missing from fb right now) into a facebook app would leverage the infrastructure of facebook while also providing a free option for project management (altruistic, but hey, it's the internet!).

a quick search of the facebook app business directory showed no signs of anything that anywhere near resembles pm tools. this could be great.