Sligo-based new-media marketing company Nooked is the powerhouse behind the new Big Brother application on social networking site, Facebook.
Mixing TV pop culture with the increasingly popular Facebook portal, MSN and Big Brother have an application that gives users the latest Big Brother 8 gossip and evictions.
Nooked, who is supplying the technology behind this Facebook widget, or add-on, mix Really Simple Syndication (RSS) which is a website news feed with marketing to provide what they call Really Simple Shopping.
Because Facebook provides open documents Application Programming Interface (APIs), it allows third party developers like Nooked to add content to its platform.
The Big Brother application which was commissioned by Channel 4 and is powered by Nooked, has over 9,000 subscribers to date.
Many widgets have been created for popular social sites like photo hosting portal Flickr, music site Last.fm, and travel site TripAdvisor. The popularity of these applications demonstrates the demand for social networking integration, and the ease with which it can be done if a site uses open-source coding.
The neck-and-neck battle between Facebook, MySpace and Bebo may not last very long as Facebook makes itself so multi-platform friendly in a world where everyone finds it difficult to keep track of all their instant messaging, mail, shopping, news feeds, photos, and socializing.
By Marie Boran
