“iWant” released for facebook

My second major facebook app is ready for the world. The first portfolio facebook app, leveraging the amazing poetry generator at randomhaiku.com, tore through the facebook world with gusto and reached 300 users in only a couple of weeks. It's reached a plateau at around 450 users, which I suppose is about as many people in the world who are interested in random poetry. Amen. My sophomore offering is called "iWant". (thanks to Joey Lomanto for designing the logo and icon) The concept came from Sahver K who said she wanted a gift list app for facebook, where she could broadcast items she'd like for Christmas. What a great idea! I'd like something like that too. I started searching, thinking that of the 100,000 apps out there, someone must have already done it. But alas! searching through the apps I found 99,999 stupid apps allowing me to "X" a friend with "Y" (bite a friend and make them a zombie, buy them a drink, send them a cute kitten picture, go on a panty raid, etc etc). But a simple thing like telling people what gifts they'd enjoy? Not a single offering. Perhaps that's too ... useful? So here it is. This facebook app is special: it's the only one I've ever seen that has an integrated Firefox toolbar. With the toolbar, you can browse the web, and when you see something you like, click on the toolbar and add it to iWish. It's so easy, it's actually fun. Get the toolbar here. From a developer's perspective, getting the facebook-enabled FF toolbar working involved conjunction of quite a few obscure developer skills in my arsenal: the FB API and authentication, DOM manipulation, AJAX, XUL, javascript in the chrome, asynchronous event handling. Many hours were spent scouring the Mozilla and Facebook wikis. The app just made it out of beta, so it may still have some glitches. If you find one, leave a comment below, or better: post about it here. Go and try it out right now!