Using the Facebook Platform with PHP to Boost Your Online Business

Facebook is a rapidly growing web community site used by many on the internet to network. Facebook comes as a nice alternative to sites like MySpace and is definitely gaining momentum. Developers can create their own applications within Facebook using the developer's tools known as the Facebook Platform. This is a great way to let people provide services to Facebook members within its own site. Before, businesses were allowed to have pages on Facebook within a persons network, but they were not interactive at all. Now with the recent developer changes, if you have a service to provide, you can be linked right in with Facebook members' lists of online buddies. For example, if you own a bookstore and sell online with a website, you can notify subscribers of new releases, sales or coupons. This is a fantastic way to get the word out there about your business or service in a hot and populated area of the internet. These new developments also come as great news to advertisers because interactive business development within Facebooks stands to keep users on the site longer. Instead of Facebook users looking elsewhere for shopping, news or other online content they can find what they need right within the site. While Facebook has not said how they intend to monetize this new area, they have said that they do not plan on sharing any profits with the developers themselves. The reward comes with the exposure your site and business will gain and basically serves as a nice big interactive advertisement that you can update on the spot.

Facebook also has a certain stability given that it has yet to 'sell out' to bigger or more powerful companies like its counterparts in MySpace or YouTube. The management at Facebook want to keep creative control over the fast growing company and recently declined an offer from Yahoo! for one billion dollars. Sources say they are planning on keeping the company private as long as possible and going public in a few years.

Facebook has also allowed anyone with an email address to join their community. In years past, only members with verifiable university email addresses were allowed to join. Now everyone can feel free to partake in this fresh online networking experience. It has been estimated that 100,000 new users sign up for the service per day. Facebook seems to be growing at a rapid pace and you will definitely want to get in on the action if you have something to advertise.

You can check out SitePoint's guide to using the Facebook Developers Platform for more information on using this innovative technology.