Facebook platform - travel applications

A little while back, Facebook announced their 'platform' platform. Basically they opened up a way for others to write applications for facebook. The idea is that people can now enrich their facebook profile. Writing a facebook application is quite easy. They have an API which can be used to create those applications, query the facebook databases (for example to find all friends of a certain user) and they even implemented FBML (FaceBook Markup Language) - a sort of a mini HTML that makes sure that all application will have a common look, and also includes some nice short-cuts to access facebook information.

The virality of this model is very strong - if an application is visible on a user's profile, all his friends see it, and then the can easily install it to...

One company that used the new 'platform' is TripTouch (travel 2.0 Israeli startup, co-founded by Gil and Ron from StartupIsrael). TripTouch is now providing a simple travel application called TripRecord - you can record all the countries you visited, and display them on your profile. FaceBook applications can be seen as a marketing 'tool' - providing a highly viral way to promote your service or brand, in a relatively small effort. If you have a facebook account click here to create your visited country list.