Stanford professor BJ Fogg and Facebook fanboy extraordinare Dave McClure put on a class this fall for Stanford students interested in building their own Facebook apps. To the likely detriment of all involved, the class turned out to be a rousing success.

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.