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O’Reilly just published a great interview with me on their FYI blog. If you want to learn why my book, FBML Essentials is important to you as a Facebook developer or business looking to develop Facebook applications, you should check it out. At the end, Mary Rotman announced a competition that could get you a free copy of my book, straight from O’Reilly.

Here’s the deal: regardless of whether you’re a Facebook developer or not, all you need is an idea. Let’s consider this the pre-cursor to getting your fbFund money — I’ll show you how to get started making the app, fbFund will fund the way. Simply go to O’Reilly’s FYI post and enter in the comments the application you would build (or are building) and how it’s different from the rest of the hundreds of Facebook applications out there. The best one or two ideas get a free copy of FBML Essentials – bring it to the next Social Media conference that I’m at and I’ll even sign it for you! How cool is that???

I’ve been contemplating for awhile now a good way to share what I know about Social Software Development and helping business owners, marketers, and developers learn how to set up their own social apps. Especially for developers, I know there are many out there looking for howtos and ways to learn more about starting their own App, promoting it, and getting it off the ground. As the author of FBML Essentials, I feel I am well suited for the task so in the next few days I’m going to start doing howtos and overviews on how you can get your own Apps together. If you’re “the business type”, I may get a little technical on you, but I do recommend you keep watching and forward these onto your IT personell – your CIO, CTO, and the like should read these so they can learn what’s possible to integrate into your existing environments. I’ll also try to throw in a little goodie here and there for “the business type”.

So, I’ve created a new category to the right, “Social Coding” – if you want to track just that, click on the category name and add it to your RSS. I’ve also started a new FriendFeed Room where those involved or that want to get involved in Social Coding can discuss, learn, and talk with each other. You can subscribe to that here.

Let’s start by going over the types of sites I could cover. Here are just a few – let me know if you have a particular interest in learning about how to code for any one in particular:

Facebook

OpenSocial

Google Friend Connect

Twitter

FriendFeed

Pligg

Digg

MySpace

WordPress

MoveableType

Google App Engine

Bungee Connect

Stay tuned! I’ll keep posting news and other rants as we go forward – I’ll just be adding in some good howtos at the same time. Oh, and if you’re a developer and would like to do a howto in your preferred language for us, contact me – I’d love to let you do a guest post.