BEST Awards at Bebo SF proves Social Apps are all about engagement

"Bebo's Engage to Success Today" Best Awards and Developer Meetup was held at Bebo SF yesterday.

It was a special day for me to see the grand finale of my project I started in October to help Bebo lay the foundation of a developer program. I started with an MRD for Developer Outreach and we filled product gaps in the platform by quickly launching Javascript suppport (FBJS equivalent called SNJS on bebo) and engagement metrics and announced the BEST Contest @ BeboDevNite in Nov 2008. Sun has been a loyal partner offering 1 year free hosting on joyent for bebo apps. They also offered the grand prize of a Sun Server to the BEST awards winner.

People Speak But Numbers Speak Louder

The best part of this project for me has been the bebo team and how developers got excited and gave feedback to get SNJS from beta to live. I remember countless spreadsheets and discussions keeping laser like focus on engagement. Bebo Platform is essentially the same as Facebook Platform, so anyone with a facebook app could port overnite to bebo. But the focus was to help developers with engaging apps build on bebo so they can monetize, scale and be successful.

There were 2000 new applications submitted to the contest in 2 months!
Developers email to bebo has grown 8 folds.
Engagement in terms of time spent/user/month for apps has grown by 70% overall.

This just proves that users are returning to use the apps on bebo.

Best Awards Event :

Top four apps were shortlisted as honarable mentions. They get Bebo's marketing support. Judges Dave McClure and Frank Gruber joined us in person. Jesse Stay could not join in person and tweeted his support.

1. Solid Sudoku - play solo Sudoku or challenge friends with a clean, stream-lined interface. Solid Sudoku can be found on Bebo at: http://apps.bebo.com/tx-sudoku.

2. Robokill Trainer with J2Play - liberate Space Station Titan Prime in this classic arcade shooter with RPG elements. Robokill Trainer with J2Play can be found on Bebo at: http://apps.bebo.com/robokill.

3. Bananagrams - form words as quickly as possible using letter tiles and the first player to use all their tiles then declares "Bananas!" and wins the game. Bananagrams can be found on Bebo at: http://apps.bebo.com/bananagrams.

4.Kick Mania - an animated game with low level violence and high level fun. Kick Mania can be found on Bebo at: http://apps.bebo.com/kickmania.

The holy trinity of apps is distribution, engagement and monetization says Mr.Social Network Dave McClure
He had valuable advice to add developers and entrepreneurs on social platforms.



The event warmed up with Rockband, typical bebo style http://qik.com/video/1067075

Amy Berg, Bebo Platform Community Manager set the stage listing the top 5 apps. This was followed by bananagram app demo.



This was followed by Bowling Buddys by John of Playfish. I love all Playfish apps, they are a class apart! They bring real life games with a real life like engagement online. They have one of the best leaderboards ever.



Markus of TheBroth showed kickmania app. It is a cool game to use physics to kick someone.
Funny you can choose different kind of legs and buy shoes with virtual currency.



Dave Mcclure and Frank Gruber did a demo of Solid Sudoku as the developer could not join us. They were awesome with their expert comments and cracked up the audience.





And the Winner was Bowling Buddies! Congratulations Playfish!!! John of Playfish received his trophy and joked saying he will throw the server up in their cloud.

Pictures from bestawards are here - http://twitpic.com/photos/bebodevnite
Tweets from the event are here - http://search.twitter.com/search?q=bestawards

The best part of the event was the valley's ever enthusiastic social app developers who hobnobbed with the bebo engineers and the cool top developers and to leave knowing focusing on engagement has really worked to help bebo and the developers! So this is just a new beginning!