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In what is sure to cause a flood of questionably usable Facebook apps (because they're all so useful now), Stanford University is offering a class on the subject of application deployment on the popular social network. There's a Facebook Group for the course here.
Saddled with the unwieldy name of "Create Engaging Web Applications Using Metrics and Learning on Facebook", the course will have students developing and deploying apps on the Facebook developer platform. Once out in the wild, the junior developers will use detailed numerical measurements to guide future progress of their apps, says VentureBeat.
The class will first work in groups of 3 - 5 to develop a Facebook application of their choice. This will then be followed up by an education based app such as for sharing papers or notes. The students will be graded based on the number of users they get to actively use their apps, and at the end of the course, they will be able to present their applications to potential investors.
This concept seems a bit flawed seeing as it is graded on number of users. With such a large potential prize at the end of the course, beyond your grade, it is not unimaginable there will be a lot of networking going on to get friends, and friends-of-friends to install apps with little to no real use.