Facebook: MyPicks Beijing

MyPicks Beijing is a new application for Facebook, that lets people compete with their friends online by predicting medal winners throughout the Beijing Olympic Games.

The application allows players to pick Gold, Silver and Bronze medal winners for each event during the Games and win points for their country with each correct prediction.

MyPicks Beijing was created on the world’s first “social programming environment”, Zembly, which was specifically designed for creating and hosting Facebook applications.

Zembly allows developers to build Facebook and other social web applications without the cost and complexity of hosting and managing the application themselves.

Zebly helps people:

• author social applications using your browser
• participate and collaborate with others around live, editable code
• use the richness of popular web APIs to create your applications
• publish your social applications to multiple social platforms with a single click

On one hand, I think this is very cool, because it opens up the social application development to everyone. I had a couple that I wanted to create for a couple of restaurant clients and they were cost-prohibitive. That barrier has been removed now, for the most part.

On the other hand, this concerns me a little bit because now we’re going to have more zombies, more vampires, more bunnies and goofy growing gifts. I guess we’ll see what happens!