Old Post, New Information Surfaces About Mysterious Project Spartan

By now, most of you have probably heard at least something about Facebook's highly-anticipated Project Spartan. I wonder, though, how many of you remember this post, written by our very own Ian Hamilton some 22 months ago. See, Ian hasn't been an active AppAdvice contributor for some time, but his legacy is teetering on the edge of legend after revisiting the insights published in that August 2009 article. In it, Ian touts the merits of one Joe Hewitt, lead designer of the official iPhone Facebook app. After serving as a beta tester for Hewitt, Ian concluded that the coder's then-latest work (Facebook's 3.0 app release), was a potential harbinger of something far greater:

I think there’s a chance Facebook 3.0 is a precursor to the release of an App Store within an App Store. Hewitt has introduced a major design concept of Apple’s into Facebook 3.0 in the form of a customizable homescreen. He’s taken the natural feeling we get from adding apps to the homescreen of the iPhone and ported it to the homescreen of Facebook. You can add pages and profiles to homescreens and swipe between them just like you do apps on the iPhone. ...So I send this question out to all our developers out there – is this possible? Could you search for apps and install them to your Facebook homescreen without requiring Apple’s approval every time? If so, imagine the possibilities. ...I could be wrong, but I can’t imagine this being hard to implement. It would simply be the next iteration of Facebook Connect for iPhone.

Compared to the assumed functionality of Project Spartan (namely its being the core foundation of an HTML5-based web app boutique and distribution center), Ian's vision is eerily accurate; and, in a rarity for blog posts everywhere, his piece is more relevant now than the day it was written. Still, a lot had to change for Ian's fantasy to permeate the realm of the real world. Back in late 2009. for example, Hewitt expressed a great deal of trepidation in proceeding with such App Store-challenging goals. He quickly responded to Ian's ideas, saying,

“I don’t think Apple would be too fond of us allowing developers to build apps that skirt the App Store by running within our app. That doesn’t mean there aren’t examples of where such apps would be useful, but at this time I’m not planning on supporting that.”

Of course, in the consumer technology and social networking spaces, progress moves and landscapes change at a decidedly rapid clip. With the controversy surrounding Apple's announced (and ultimately rescinded) subscription policy came a heightened awareness of the future importance of browser-based web apps in the mobile space. Assuming it's approached correctly, many are viewing the platform as a model capable of competing with the dominating "walled garden" of Apple's massive content delivery system. MG Siegler, who first reported Project Spartan, discusses Facebook's perceived overall strategy in a recent TechCrunch report:

Previously, we speculated that Project Spartan and the iPad app release could be related. In fact, we had heard that Facebook and Apple were even working together on some things, at least loosely. While the ultimate goal of Spartan is clearly for HTML5 prevail, it is possible that Apple simply doesn’t believe it will anytime soon and is happy to help Facebook try their hand, while also helping the web in general move beyond Flash (think of the position Flash would be in without all those games requiring it). Notes one developer: Facebook wants a cut of the Apple’s mobile app market, that’s been clear this entire time. Perhaps it’s not war against Apple — maybe Apple is just going to ‘gift’ Facebook the share of their market (the HTML5 share) in exchange [for] an alliance being formed whereby Apple get’s [sic] some exclusive access to Facebook’s 600 million-plus users and thereby cutting out Google (exclusive to some degree, Facebook is too open for it to be fully exclusive). In this theory, it’s not Facebook Spartans vs. Apple, it’s Facebook/Apple Spartans Vs Google.

Also posited in Siegler's post is the general look and feel of Project Spartan. The images below are a TechCrunch-modified mockup based on several source UI leaks, and many of these sources indicate that Facebook's new app environment has quite a bit more merit than most analysts currently bestow upon it. Notes Seigler,

One developer says that the quality of the apps on the platform is really surprising — in a good way, naturally. Apparently, there are going to be a ton of games that will be a part of the Spartan launch. This shouldn’t be too surprising, HTML5 gaming has been something Facebook has been pushing. And Zynga is believed to be heavily involved in the project.

Based on recent rumblings, Project Spartan is expected to launch anywhere from next week to next month, though we expect an August event is most likely. And, from the looks of things, that event should be a huge one.

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