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We’re proud to announce the launch of our first Facebook application: Employees! Employees allows page managers to add bios for individuals without linking to their actual profiles, hitting the balance between showing off their team and respecting the privacy of their actual Facebook accounts.

We came up with the idea for Employees when we were first building our own Facebook page: we wanted to show off the Beaconfire staff, but many of us didn’t want links directly to our personal Facebook profiles. In addition, because of the way Facebook cordons people off, those profiles would mostly only be viewable by folks in the Washington DC area. We also wanted to be able to write short bios on what our staff do at Beaconfire so that people looking to work with us knew a little about the people they’d meet.

Adding Employees to your Facebook page is easy - just click here to learn more about the application and click “Add to Page.” Then you can populate it with your team’s bios and pictures (sorry, caricatures not included!). If you’d like to see Employees in action, just visit Beaconfire’s Facebook page to try it out (about halfway down on the right).

Building this application taught us a lot about working in an entirely new space - unlike most development projects we work on, where the platform is stable, the Facebook developer environment is always changing. In the next couple weeks, we’ll have a few posts here on the Wire about developing for Facebook, and some of what we learned - part of this project was getting our feet wet on a project for ourselves so we’ll be prepared to dive right in when we start work on client applications.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 18th, 2008 at 2:29 pm and is filed under About Us, Social Networks, Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.