There has been a lack of content at Is it Contagious for a couple of days while my business partner at Marlin Internet Holdings and I launched our first Facebook application. It's called Sweet! Gifts. The process of creating the application has been fun. We worked with different artists and programmers to get most everything in place. At the end of the day the application is primarily a learning tool for us. Don't get me wrong, we are like every other application team in hoping it becomes sickly viral. If it does-great! If it does not-no big deal. Regardless of the application's success, it's going to help this site write about the application development community. It keeps me in the loop with what is going on, and it makes me much more familiar with the inter-workings of the applications themselves than I was before. In particular it will help for an upcoming feature on the different monetization options out there for applications since it will allow us to try different ones out. We will have the luxury of experimenting with little too lose since we look at our application as a learning curve tool. Frankly, I can not imagine any other way of getting a legitimate feel, not just for the mechanical operation of the platform, but for what works and does not work.

We will not use this site to push Sweet! Gifts on readers, but a little bit about it should help for future references to it or explain the basis of certain opinions.

Why a Gift Application:
We did not try and re-invent the wheel with our first application. We knew that gift applications worked because Facebook had already created one. We originally were developing a paid version just like Facebook's, but with better gifts. Then we found out that several applications were already doing free gifts. Hard to compete on that price. We still felt like it was worth going forward, but without any type of payment. This probably was a blessing in disguise. The development process was much simpler without trying to integrate micro-payments. Plus, we figured there was still room for cleverness, and some additional unique ideas within the "free virtual gift application" niche.

The Results:
Obviously it is much too early to say anything definitive. We released the application at approximately 2 PM central time, and a little over twenty-four hours later we are at 476 users. The good news is that is far more users than we expected, but the bad news is few of our friends are adding the application. In fact, we have no idea who these people are who are adding the application. I have not had a chance to look into the analytics too closely, but the early sense is that the application is growing steadily with few problems. That is not to say everyone actually likes it. A couple of people took the time to write on the "reviews" section that the application "SUCK!!!!!!!" and another said the pictures were "crap." Luckily for developers there is no way to do anything about such things. Oh well.

Update: I have updated the graph from Appaholic to reflect the one week results of the Sweet! Gifts application. It hit 1,600 users. Is that great? Depends on expectations. The growth was fast for the first five days, but has cooled since late Sunday. It is clear that with a virtual gift application, a steady stream of gifts is required. July 24th.

Tags: facebook application, disclosure