Our Stanford course on Facebook apps reached a milestone today: the KissMe app, created by students Chris Mocko, Eduardo Abeliuk, and Joel Darnauer, broke into Facebook’s top 100 apps, ranked 95th by Appsaholic. The team launched KissMe about two weeks ago.

As of today, Appsaholic ranks the student trio as the 8th best Facebook developer for growth. (I think they will get an A on this part of our course.)

Congrats, guys!

These numbers will probably seem quaint a few weeks from now when the KissMe app is even more popular.

The KissMe’s team’s success is both good and bad for a course like ours. On one hand, it’s good because the other 70+ students can see the possibilities. On the other hand, the break-out success of KissMe is bad because it’s tempting to focus on this one big success and not continue to address needs of the entire class.

We’re not venture capitalists looking for one BIG win. That’s not our model.

We’re teachers and coaches. And in this context, we’re working with 70+ students, trying to help each team succeed.

Yes, we’re thrilled with KissMe’s success. But we need to help all the students. So yesterday we leveraged the success of KissMe by having their team talk about what course principles had helped their app go big. (They played along nicely.)

Here’s how I see it . . .

The success of our course and our teaching approach will be measured not by the best app in class. Instead, I’m looking at the bottom of our class rankings . . . what’s the worst app from a student team who is listening, working hard, and really trying to succeed?

In other words, when our course ends in December, the worst Facebook app in our Stanford class — not the best app — will show our success or failure in teaching students to create engaging web applications.

That’s pretty challenging. But it’s fun too . . . so stay tuned.

–BJ Fogg

It’s Week 6….and 25 apps are LIVE!

Today’s class is a mini app expo - we’re giving each team two minutes to present their apps. There have been approximately 150,000 installs across all apps to date, with a few frontrunners (we’ll let you explore the apps page to find out for yourself which apps are the most viral so far).

We’ve invited bloggers from TechCrunch, VentureBeat, GigaOM to class today, so keep an eye out for more detailed info about the apps in the coming days.

See the Apps page for a full list of apps.

— Dan Ackerman Greenberg, Head TA

One student in our Stanford Facebook class, “Persuasive Apps & Metrics,” started this week’s paper with a confession:

“My favorite app is, well, none. I have totally stopped using apps.”

This student is not alone. If you’ve been swamped in apps lately, you may feel the same way. He continues,

“Apps are like shiny new toys to try out, but I have yet to find one that keeps me coming back. “

He wraps his paper:

“So, I am sitting here waiting for the next gen of FB apps. I suspect that these apps will only come when there is a) a built-in ad network on FB and b) a built-in billing system for micropayments and other transactions. Until then, I am looking forward to seeing more shiny toys.”

Well, I hope this student isn’t completely serious. I hope he’s not just “sitting there waiting” (Hey! . . . you gotta ship FB App #1 for this course 9 days from now!). We want our students to learn how to create engaging apps. They know that. This student knows that.

Learning a process for making compelling apps is the big challenge for our course (note that this is a thinking process, not a coding process). We hope that the process we develop will apply beyond Facebook, transforming “shiny new toys” on any platform into “favorite toys” we can all enjoy for years.

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–BJ Fogg

I’ve thoroughly enjoyed teaching the new Stanford Facebook course with a team of talented people. You’ll find them listed here.

Since I started teaching at university level in 1990, I’ve worked with assistants and peers. But I’ve never had a whole crew of people working together on one course, each bringing lots of expertise to the table. The team approach has made our new class much better than I imagined. Of course, I don’t get as much airtime in class as usual (probably a good thing for the students), but I’m learning more.

So thanks, everyone, for joining the adventure!

–BJ Fogg

The Facebook Course I’ve been teaching with Dave McClure and Dan Ackerman Greenberg has been in session for two weeks. There’s so much to talk about, I want to summarize a few things:

More than expected, the media has covered the course. The reporters usually spin our course to intrigue their readers, even if the story is not totally accurate. (For example, many say that we’re hosting an expo in December for investors. Not true. And we keep telling reporters the investor angle is not true, but they keep writing this into their stories. More on media in future posts.)

The students have been superb: smart, flexible, dynamic . . . This is the best part: working with students.

The course has gotten richer as we’ve expanded our Tuesday 3-hour labs to bring in experts from Slide, Rock You, and more. We’re also able to give students more hands-on technical help than we expected.

We’ve settled on short name for the course: “Persuasive apps & metrics.” Coming up with a short name that captured the course well wasn’t simple. But we’re mostly happy with the result.

Biggest surprise: How many people and companies have offered to help us (thank you!). Of course, each person has a motive, often the ability to later recruit talent from the class. Not all offers are useful to us, but we’ve welcomed talent and services that improve the course.

That’s the quick update. More soon.

BJ Fogg

Yesterday we taught the first Facebook class at Stanford, with over 100 student crammed into a temporary room that still wasn’t big enough.

My co-teacher Dave McClure, my trusty TA Dan Ackerman-Greenberg, and new Team Coach Yee Lee helped teach the 3-hour class. We had a lot of fun.

We’ve set up more info on the course here: http://captology.stanford.edu/facebook.html

You’ll see that our course isn’t about the code part of FB apps. We’re focusing on the psychology and metrics of Facebook, and how understanding these two pieces can help developers create superior applications on Facebook–or on whatever platform opens up next (and apparently more are coming soon).

What’s new here is how Facebook Platform has brought the creator and user close together through Facebook product features like Reviews and Discussion Boards, as well as built-in metrics of uptake and engagement. Anyone can see exactly how people are responding to a Facebook app, both individually and collectively.

The feedback loop between creator and user is so small now that we’ve crossed a threshold–an important one. I believe we’re entering a new era for designing interactive products. And that’s why this course matters.

That said, we all agree our new course is risky. It could turn out to be a disaster, not just for a few students but for over 100 students, some of whom came back to school from academic leave to enroll in the course.

So I gotta hand it to Stanford University. This is an institution that welcomes innovation, like this new course. I hope our students appreciate this fact. I sure do.

–BJ Fogg

So I can finally announce that I’m teaching a new course on Facebook this fall with Dave McClure and Dan Ackerman-Greenberg.

Students will focus on creating Facebook apps and using metric tools (like Google Analytics) to optimize the apps. We’ll grade students in part on how deeply their apps engage users.

I proposed the new course because I believe we’ve entered a new era of interaction design. The distance between creator and user has become extremely small, thanks to Facebook Platform. This is the shape of things to come, and I want to understand it early.

Persuasion plays a key role in all of this. Facebook is the most persuasive technology of 2007. Studying the psychology of Facebook and the new apps available there should be both fun and enlightening.

I’ve posted a bit more on another page.

–BJ Fogg