The last FB Dev Meetup was hosted at Spock at Redwood City on Aug 30th 7pm.
30+ people showed up, and it was very informal led by Lawrence Sinclair, a quiet leader who let the group decide on the agenda. We had a round of intros and cool demos of Facebook Apps.
The group pitched in great ideas and brainstormed with each App developer.
Jay Bhatti co-founder of the people search engine Spock shared his enthusiasm about their Cartoon You Facebook App and how any user's attribute for the Cartoon in Facebook gets added as a tag to the user's Spock profile. The Spock Developer Wayne was modestly standing and spoke to everyone without pushing his App.
The Standford Duo Rob Fan and Brett Keintz were there with their 2 cool Apps - iheart and a cool game.
The audience has a mix of people building facebook apps, some business trying to understand whats a facebook app and what will make sense to build to extend their business to Facebook and many many smart people trying to figure out how to get into the Facebook Apps world.
Faraz came from enterprisetoolbar.com who has the product findit toolbar to find answer to the question, "can fb user use findit toolbar in some form?". Hui was building a multi user video chat upon david kings "vawkr technology". Sujee Maniyam (http://sujee.net/) wanted to learn about Facebook Apps building.
phil wong from oracle there to listen said Oracle was focused on Web2.0 at events.oracle. ccom
Mr. Clement Huang of Copacast has a targeting technology that can help monetize any community including FB App users was there, he was modest about his pitch and I wish I had learned more.
There is no official format for the evening and you can volunteer to show a demo of your facebook App.
Demo 1: Courses App's presented by Michael Staton, experience shared with amazing honesty
Has 50K users, was teacher wanted o build something for students, courselist.
1. Get it out as soon as you can. Users are very forgiving.
15 yr old posted a courses app 12 hrs ahead of them and got users mindshare.
2. Make invite page first, come with a gimmick, throw a paper airplane at people.
3. Users will send message directly fast. He hears from lot of textbook sellers. Set aside time for outside communications. Its easy to get sidetracked with negotiations, lot of deals fall thru. but you need to followup to see which ones are good.
4. There are merging with another courses app textbook finder
5. Keep early adopters by messaging them personally.
6. People care about what goes on profile as lot , most user requests
7. Lots of app are about identity and social interaction.
8. Started before F8 when FBML was not yet announced, so build app in IFRAME APP, not FBML , we spend lot of time on CSS, gotto build friends finder etc.
He wanted to know if IFRAME excluded from Most Active App? Doesn't show in metrics as they index only one courses app.
9. Students care about - picking class, knowing who is in your class, picking profs more than actual course itself.
10. Its safe. No one can chat with any 15yr old, gotto be in the same class with them.
11. How did you spread your App when you got started?
Advertised on Scrabulous App.
Found major schools in terms of FB activity Penn State.
This App is long-term value Profs asking how to claim themselves as Prof $5.
Ad options Fb Exchange, Adonomics, Slide, RockYou.
12. How long did it take to build Course?
Moonlighting for 2 months, in retro can build it in 2 weeks. Didn't know they were Facebook was going to kill their own courses App and were not ready when there was a void. 4 people working on it part-time.
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Demo2 - Ellen Leanse Cool New Lists Application (launching now as we speak!)
- Ellen's background is Strategy, Branding work, social community work consulting
- PDG Creative in midwest is developing for Ellen.
- Project list or Grocery list or Packing list - work together and manage to-dos.
- Very Cool drag an drop items, invite a person. (wiki style collaboration)
- Build on IFRAME to make it drag and drop
- Tie to events, cannot be used outside of Facebook.
- Theres a business idea here, gotto validate and use it.
- Show it profile box, yes or not was the open discussion to the group
- Apps need to be viral. Make an app to share with friends
- Voting on images is cooler. Create cool recommendation. Social pressures that your friends is less cooler. better ranking. (younger crowd)
- Used on AC2 S3, reading and writing over network to S3, so bad performance.
- matchthis - ask questions, feeds to a system and makes recommendation to connect with people you should connect to, feedback with agreement or disagreement.
- Dating is a natural,political.
- Once you want to expand beyond your network, you can use matchthis.
- Very brainy algorithm and data massaging done, Lawrence was modest about his 6 mo effort on it so far.
Demo 4: Robert showed iheart
- Two apps helps each other, another is a game
- Robert is the most knowlegeable and articulate facebook developer who understands the social graphic and building product to tap into it.
- Random selection of friends.
- link to zazzle to make a t-shirt, link to other app (play game)
- Zoo is such a colorful and fun app, EVERYONE loved it.
- There was lot of suggestions and feedbacks to integrate voice into Zoo, which Action has got done already.
- You send an animal to a friend for free, very viral.
- How diff from tag app. Add fun and playfulness. Voicemail app was compared with Audiogift app.
- What he did for viral spreading? Built a Monkey app to promote Zoo, people actually
- facebook apps - these days you can cross promote apps like a link exchange.
I have have the privelage of getting beta previews of many cool apps build by my new facebook meetup friends. I have exercised my product management muscles by offering advice of messaging and product features to tap into the social graph.
I tried my hands at building my own test Facebook App using only FBML calls. Now I know why Dave McClure compares Facebook to Visual Basic.
Where to go from here?
I would like to get more educational discourse to help the new facebook developer covering topics on decisions they made on language, hosting platform, caching servers, finding their partners, beta testing, building viral functionality .....
Maybe we can have someone present on a topic and have a followup networking sessions in alternate meetup meetings? Do you like the idea? Are there others who think like me?
See you all tonight!
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