Athens Facebook Developer Garage
(live blogging from Athens, Zografou)

Evolution of the Web

Some stats on web, web2.0, adoption, AOL, yahoo, …, googlemaps, youtube

The facebook platform

  • Massive ditribution
  • Fast experimentation

    • but

  • Constant changes to policies

Architecture

php+java official libs (wasn’t official java support dropped???)

FQL – one table per query only (no join), access user, friend, group, group_member, event,event_member, photo, album, photo_tag

FBML – subset of HTML, some custom tags, Mock AJAX… Canvas belongs to you, apart from anything deceitful, you can put anything you want there (ads,..) – but ads like googleads don’t have context info to show related stuff, so???

Anatomy of An Application

  • Only one-line status messages can be added to user statuses from apps… bigger ones must be approved from users.
  • Now, limit to how many invitation an app can send to friends.
  • Presenter (Nikolas Kokkalis) took part to Stanford Facebook class
  • Cannot store male/female user info from facebook (for more than 24h), but if we ask users then we can!
  • Viral factor f = X*Y*Z, f>1 then Viral growth… For each user, at least one friend accepted invitation (for PerfectMatch, f was 1.4 – they had to rename to Best Match due to … lawyers!)
  • They’ve done experiments with the same exact app registered with 5 different names – and it does make A LOT OF DIFFERENCE (name matters)
  • Every concept can be made viral … with the right modifications
  • Other ways of income (apart from ads) : Virtual currency, virtual objects (VERY popular for teenagers to pay for those), surveys!!! (you ‘sell’ people filling surveys)
  • Also, users think your company is more legit if they see ads in your site.

Virality

  • It is an Art that requires a ton of Science
  • Invitation text is terribly important
  • Make it social, simple – use viral channels, ab test all
  • Viral channels in FB: invitations, notifications, newsfeed, email, profile box, profile action
  • Knowledge gap (we know the perfect match, do YOU know it? there’s a message for you, do YOU want to see it?)
  • Modify a channel, gather data, analyze results (& restart)
  • but… changing a channel can be time consuming, measuring + analyzing results difficult (reference to their http://viraltuning.com/ but not much info there yet)

Some apps

… developed by greeks

  • Greek Namedays
  • kerasmata
  • mySidebarBook