As you may already know the iPlayer Facebook application is now gone, for two reasons:

1. It was broken horribly by the launch of iPlayer 2.0
2. More importantly, it couldn’t compete with the new iPlayer as a user proposition

That second one is the main reason. It was easy to compete with iPlayer 1. I know a lot of people who were involved with the creation of the first version of iPlayer (I was, in some way, one of them), but I think it’s fair to say that very few of them would be offended if I was to say it was rubbish. They’d mostly agree.

iPlayer 2.0 on the other hand is a completely different ball game. There was no way I could continue with the Facebook application as it was. It required a serious rethink, a different spin on things, something that made more sense on Facebook, something I unfortunately didn’t have the time to work on.

So the application may be gone, but it seems like the perfect opportunity to share something I put together one weekend but never released: the black version.

Looking like a mini version of the full iPlayer (well, the old one), I think that this condensed version looks pretty good. However, I was never sure if creating an application with so much of it’s own branding was the right thing to do. I felt that sticking to the Facebook style gave users a more integrated, seamless experience, that following the conventions of the platform I was developing for was more important than some black and magenta.

This is an area that Joshua March has been looking at and his talk, Application Design: does the ‘Facebook Style’ really matter?, comes to a different conclusion. Having looked at the top 50 apps on Facebook, he discovered that applications with their own visual style actually have a higher engagement rate than those that use the Facebook style.

Maybe I should have released it after all…