I hope to get some work done on some ideas I have to develop an application on the Facebook development platform.  There are a lot of different things you can do with the API they've exposed, but I think a lot of the applications currently found in the directory add little to the Facebook experience.  The conclusion I've come to is that the best use of this API will allow a secondary community to form and interact in new ways alongside Facebook.

Currently one of main obstacles I see to the success of such a scheme is the difficulty of integrating Facebook applications with Facebook itself in a way that makes the transition between the normal UI and the application (in both directions) simple and obvious.  There's no way for a Facebook user to list in his or her profile what applications they like or use; they would have to put a link somewhere else, which is simple, but not obvious.  To get back to Facebook, you can redirect to a Facebook page, but you can't send any information to Facebook (probably for good reason).

Still, I think a lot can be done with the platform, and I will be exploring that over the next few weeks and at the event on Cinco de Mayo.

One of the things that made the update take a while was that I was experimenting with implementing this design (which is one I put together with tables a while back) entirely with CSS layout techniques instead of tables.  This proved to be quite a challenge, especially with all the browser inconsistencies with CSS.  I was able to do it, but in the end I felt like it wasn't worth the trouble, at least not for a site as small as this.  Why go through all the work of tweaking the CSS when you can use tried and true tables that render practically identically across all browsers?

The purists would say that you need to separate content and design entirely, and I can see the value of this for a large website.  But for my purposes here, I think I'll stick with the tables.  Nevertheless, I will go ahead and post the CSS version shortly, in case you're interested.  Drawing those lines isn't so easy! :)