JerseyApp
URL: apps.facebook.com/jerseyapp/
Project Objective
A friend and I decided to do a collaboration for our own personal interest. He is a marketing whiz and a sports fan, and I am a web developer and so when he managed to get more than 20,000 members in his Detroit Lions facebook fan group, we decided to do a facebook app that we could target to them. Unfortunately, as has often been the case with having too much success on facebook, the powers that be at facebook took away his fan page. The Detroit Lions wanted control of it. We decided to carry on with the project anyway, and widen its reach to target fans of all sports.
The concept is simple. Through a series of steps, create a picture of a custom sports jersey and display it on your profile. Show your team spirit.
My Involvement
The design of this project was a true collaboration. My partner and I fleshed it all out over several evenings drinking beer. We wanted it to be as simple as we could make it for the user, and we wanted it to keep a facebook look to help users feel comfortable using it.
The application is written entirely in object oriented PHP5 with a MySQL data model. The frontend makes use of facebook’s canvas and FBML platforms. It was a challenge using facebook’s platforms which are poorly documented and very very limiting. There’s a reason most of the major apps work from an iframe.
We managed to pull it all off in the end, and even hook it up to a payment provider just incase anyone wanted to pay us $1 to make more than 5 jerseys. We’ve yet to receive a cent, but have over 14,000 monthly users as of April 2010.