Stanford has hopped aboard the Facebook application bandwagon with a new class: noted developer
BJ Fogg and Facebook fanboy
Dave McClure (who
may not be employed by for Facebook but is awfully busy
flacking the company) will be teaching "Create Engaging Web Applications Using Metrics and Learning on Facebook." Although offered through the computer science department, the course appears more geared to business students. Pupils will be graded based on the number of users they can garner rather than quality of code, and there will be an event at the end of the course to pitch the applications to investors. Is it any surprise Facebook moved to the west coast and that Stanford leads Harvard in incubating technology companies? As VentureBeat
notes, while Stanford jumps on the latest tech fad and offers students a chance to strike it rich, Harvard ironically had
admonished Facebook's creator
Mark Zuckerberg and shut down a precursor to the popular Facebook for privacy violations and political correctness concerns while he was a student.