For the (entire world’s population – my direct family) who don’t know about GIVM.com, it is a very cool (IMHO), Web 1.0-ish shared gift list manager. It was born out of the frustration of trying to coordinate xmas and birthday gift giving amongst family members, especially as the family(ies) grew from people such as myself getting married.

So, the GiftList was born, originally running at bratton.com/giftlist, and it has been running for six years now, with about zero problems. It’s also been running with about zero growth. *sigh* Granted, I haven’t really tried to market it at all, because of the hope that it would virally take off.

The big problem is that the viral analogy doesn’t work for gift giving, because most gift circles are just that – circles. They have very few branch points to virally spread the word. Okay, yes, in a perfect world, somehow overlapping families would spread the word, but it hasn’t happened much at all.

One of the most amazing things about GIVM is that I managed to snag givm.com a while back. Crazy! I love the name, and when I saw it as available, I was in shock for a while before I bought it.

So, last month I heard about Facebook opening up their “platform” API thingamdooey, and I spent a few long nights porting GIVM to run inside of Facebook. One big bonus was that I back-ported some of the CSS to givm.com, so now whether you use givm.com or the GiftList app inside of Facebook, they both look pretty good.

Overall the dev experience was fairly straightforward, but I lucked out a lot that my schema design matched up very cleanly with Facebook’s. And I rock, of course.

After a week or so of anxious waiting to be approved into the Application Directory, I was in! There are a few other gift list type apps available on Facebook, but none of them have the same usability that mine has. I’ve had six freakin’ years to make sure that grandmas and grandpas can use this thing! I know where most gifts come from, baby, and you’ve got to play to your audience.

Facebook? Grandparents? Hm, not quite a match-up there yet. And that of course is the cart before the horse problem I’ve got, which is that Facebook is supposed to grow from 20ish million users to 50ish million users by the end of the year. Okay, a lot of those will be older people, not just the current FB highschoolers and college folk, but it probably will be a slow growth curve for the gray set. Which means my GiftList is probably not going to explode with high user numbers on Facebook.

After 3 weeks, I’m up to about 430 users. Lots more than givm.com, but dust in the wind compared to silly trifles like X-Me…