It's been almost a whole entire week since I left Austin, but it certainly seems better late than never.
So far this month I've been fortunate enough to have been invited to speak at a few events, and one or two I just happened to wedge myself into anyways.
I spoke at Graphing Social Patterns West in San Diego the first week in March on a concept I feel I didn't have the time to really explain sufficiently, "Social Portability" (pdf). Unfortunately most of the audience weren't developers, so I adjusted the presentation to shoot a bit higher level than usual.
Following GSP I spoke at BarCamp Austin 3 on building ASP.NET sites on top of the Mono stack (pdf). The session was relatively small, so it broke down into much more of a round table discussion (we were sitting at a literal round table) about some of our experiences with ASP.NET on Mono through Apache2/mod_mono and Lighttpd/Mono-FastCGI, etc.
Also while at SXSW I spoke at the Facebook Developer Garage Austin on the same concept as before, Social Portability, except this time the audience was far more developer oriented so I could dive into some nitty gritty bits of FBML/FBJS caveats, etc ((pdf). The Developer Garage was especially fun because the Zuckerborg was in attendance, and I met more than my fair share of interesting developer-types that were either Texans themselves, or in Texas for the event.
March is barely half over and I'm already exhausted.
Presentation Files
Social Portability.pdf (GSP)
Social Portability (Developer Garage).pdf
ASP.NET on Mono.pdf (BarCamp)
I'm not yet certain what kind of audience is going to be attending Graphing Social Patterns West, so I'm hoping I can help tip the scales in favor of developers because, to be frank, business people scare me.
I was told about AppNite and it seems like a good excuse to try to get more developers to make the trek down to San Diego to keep me company in a sea of marketers and business folk. Better yet, developers who enter the AppNite contests get 50% off the admission to the conference (enter here). Unfortunately I'm not going to enter my apps in the contest, but I do know a friend of mine Jason Rubenstein, of Just Three Words fame, has entered his app, to give you an idea of the stiff competition you'll be up against.
If that doesn't seal the deal for you, Virgin America flies to San Diego now, and round-trip flights from San Francisco to San Diego are only ~$85. Which means if you're a Silicon Valley Facebook/Bebo/OpenSocial developer you can come hang out at the conference for cheap, and if your application is good enough, get some killer exposure to potential investors, business contacts, and other developers (like me!).
Zach Allia (of Free Gifts fame), Jason Rubenstein (Just Three Words), Ryan Romanchuk (Dipity) as well as the developers on the speakers list will all be there, so it should be a fun meeting of the minds (for developers at least).
See you there!
For the past couple weeks I've been living dangerously, as some people know I live in the Tenderloin District, but that's not what I mean when I say "living dangerously." In my constant quest to squeeze as much performance out of Top Friends as possible, I've been evaluating the latest and greatest stuff that Facebook has to offer developers. In addition to the usual adding of features, tuning virality, and general application upkeep, I've been exploring mixes of FBML, FBJS, Mock AJAX, preload FQL, and batched queries all as a means to improve how fast Top Friends is for our users. I've been saying for months that it's exceptionally important to keep up with all of Facebook's changes, for better or for worse, and sometimes they throw out gems like preload FQL that will help shape new and interesting ways you can utilize Facebook's data inside your application.
The Feature
The first obvious thing that I wanted to apply preload FQL to, was a new feature we've pushed out called "Top Friends News" which aggregates "what's going on" with your Top Friends.
Coming up in the first week of March you'll be able to find me doing one of my three favorite things (right behind, writing code and sleeping), I'll be talking, in front of people, about Facebook, Bebo and "social applications." If you are one of the four people that have gone on record has having actually subscribed to my RSS feed, you might know that I spoke at something called "Graphing Social" in the past, but this time I'm speaking at "Graphing Social Patterns West" which will be occurring in parallel to O'Reilly's "ETech (Emerging Technology) Conference)" in San Diego March 3rd and 4th.
I'll be talking briefly, in front of people, on tuesday March 4th about during a joint session on "Social App Development 101: Elements of Style," where I'll be discussing some of keystone pieces of building an application that "pops" on Facebook and Bebo, and designing for portability, etc. My session is going to be brief, so I will most likely be employing my crouching-ninja-presentation technique, where the slides rotate every quarter-second at such a fast pace that the content becomes melded into my audiences' subconscious. It's been rumored to cause brain hemorrhaging, but that's nothing but an urban legend, I promise.
In general the entire event should be lots of fun; I'm looking forward to schmoozing with the speakers lined up for the event, as well the time-honored tradition at O'Reilly conferences, playing a good old game of "Find Tim and tickle him until he pees himself."
Overall the combination of GSP West and ETech looks like it's going to make for an interesting couple of days in San Diego, go ahead and register now to make sure you can get in.
I don't feel quite as awesome as I did last summer when I tell people that I "develop facebook applications." Despite personally being really happy with my applications, I get the feeling that users now perceive facebook apps as spammy, poorly designed, and pointless. Sure, there are some applications that are knowingly like this (and they are probably making some quick cash), but to many new developers they just don't know any better.
The points in Tyler's post, as well as the ones below, will help new developers start on the right track and then we can all feel awesome again to be a facebook application developer. I am staying away from saying "don't spam" because that is a topic in need of it's own post.
Just because you haven't seen it doesn't mean it isn't there. Do a little research on existing applications with the same idea before you start development. This will help you decide whether you should pick up their best features and improve on them, or just scrap your idea altogether. There is definitely room for similar applications, but don't build a product if you can't make it better.
She may be hot, but she has no brain. Looks are great, but make sure you have a well built application to support your idea. Users love to uninstall when they see error messages.
Keep improving and adding features to your applications based on user requests, they really know best. I may be crazy, but I like to read and respond to nearly every (positive) comment and suggestion on Free Gifts boards.
I am starting to see more and more novice developers on the Facebook forums as well as the IRC channel asking fewer and fewer "development" questions and more and more "product" questions. I find this incredibly interesting because it means one of two things: either everybody has figured out how to use the Facebook platform or an increasing number of people are putting the proverbial cart before the horse when it comes to developing Facebook applications.
Call me cynical about the first option, but I find it highly unlikely that everybody figured out how to use the Facebook Platform; despite its low entry barrier many people are over-thinking it or simply trying to develop a Facebook application before they figure out how to build a web application in general.
The second option is far more likely, Facebook applications have reached such a level of ubiquity that "everybody and their mother" wants to write a Facebook application these days. Right now at a small consulting firm in Omaha, Nebraska some middle manager is asking his lead developer if the firm can reinvigorate their collaborative synergies and utilize the social graph to further meet their clients needs.
Facebook is the new Windows, and the Facebook Platform is the new Visual Basic and I feel as if there is a burden on "us" (the existing "top developers" on the platform) to start to cultivate a community that will encourage stylish, functional and ultimately useful applications on the Facebook platform, to ensure that there will never be a "Facebook 98" or a "Facebook ME".
Here's a couple of the best tips I can offer, and maybe Zach (developer of Free Gifts) can help expand.
Facebook has been pretty nice to Free Gifts in the past, despite originally being a blatant rip-off of the real Gifts application. Prior to today, I have only received one complaint from Facebook regarding Free Gifts practices. They asked me to remove a gift that looked similar to one of their gifts. I was okay with that even though mine was a lemon and theirs was a lime; maybe it was tough for the color blind audience to decipher? Today, I received my second complaint from them, which stated:
I will admit it is relatively the same wording, but they failed to explain how using "Send xxxx a Gift" is deceptive or misleading to users. First of all, Facebook provides a tool tip when you hover over a profile action which says "Provided by the xxxxxx Application," which immediately makes a distinction between Gifts and Free Gifts. Second, as far as I know, users are still sending a gift when they use Free Gifts. Third, I have been using this text for longer than I can remember now with no complaints. With over 50 million gifts sent, I have never had a user say they were "trying to use the real gift" application.
We've been working pretty hard for the past month (well, for the past 8 months too) but I'm particularly proud of the work that my co-conspirator and I have been putting in on Top Friends (we're that green line that creeps up from behind on FunWall and Super Wall).
One of the most helpful "tools" that's been available to me has been Slide's competitive spirit. In addition to the 2,000+ developers on the Facebook platform we have some pretty healthy competition going on inside Slide as well. Between Top Friends, SuperPoke and FunWall there is plenty of trash-talking and "friendly competition" (read: if it weren't an HR violation, I'd of already resolved to dirty tactics). In doing so we've cultivated an environment where some of the most often heard phrases are: "Is Facebook down again?!" and "OH SCHNAP!"
It was recently announced that Slide (this little start-up that I work for) raised some more money. Neato.
Since Max isn't the aeron chair kind of CEO, it looks like we're going to spend that money on things like "engineers, hardware, etc." Bummer, I've always wondered how an $800 chair can exist that doesn't rub your feet and write your code for you.
Regardless, should be a fun year.
(p.s. we need more engineers)
I spoke with Tammy (our PR mastermind) about whether or not Slide was going to let me out of my cage to go to South by Southwest Interactive this coming March and it seems like they might actually let me! (I'm just as surprised as you are)
Unfortunately things with Facebook were at such a ridiculous pace when SXSWi was accepting panel submissions, that I never got a chance to submit my panel idea: "Slide is awesome, now let's talk about how great Slide is." This leaves me in a slightly awkward position, I cannot remember the last conference or event that I went to where I wasn't speaking or talking or dancing with a baboon in front of a live studio audience. Even at the last SXSWi I was there for about 36 hours and most of that time was spent setting up and then helping run BarCamp Austin2. Ideally I'd like to get on stage with some of the guys from Twitter, Facebook, Bebo, Google and maybe even Myspace to discuss the more open social web that we seem to be moving towards and a bit about how awesome Slide is. It's probably nothing more than a pipe-dream however, since the panels seem to be quite locked down at the moment.
Of course, if nobody will have me, then I might be relegated to slumming up and down 6th street in Austin hanging out with the usual drunkards that I know in Austin (you know who you are) and getting into trouble. Mmm, trouble.
Regardless, if you're going to be in Austin for SXSWi let me know, I've got a stack of swanky new business cards I want to get rid of :)
Sergio, one of our talented web monkeys, sent an email out today that started with "OMFGBBQ!"
As it turns out, Sergio is a much more religious reader of Penny Arcade than the rest of us (a public shaming and revocation of some geek cards is in order) since he was the first to notice this:
Click to view the image fullsize
Hell yes.
As a side note, I have Sergio to thank for the sweet drag-and-drop interface on the Top Friends edit page and now for bringing some Gabe and Tycho love to our attention.
As part of what consists of my day/night/weekend job, developing Facebook applications like Top Friends, I spent a lot of time on Facebook (mostly losing games of Scrabulous to other developers). Since I spend anywhere between 20 and 30 hours a day on Facebook, I see a lot of Facebook's ads, and in particular, Facebook's "Flyers".
The concept at it's most basic level is a novel one, allow posting a flyer, similar to stapling a "Free Couch" flyer to a bulletin board, except on Facebook. In practice however, they suck. They suck bad. Really bad. I have a much higher respect for advertisers that can come up with ads that are either intriguing, or at the very least, not absolutely painful to see.
Over the past week I've been quietly taking screenshots of the absolutely worst Flyers that I've seen that have brought me close to sending a flaming bag of poo down to Palo Alto. Think about the lame kind of spam you get in your inbox, that's about the level that Facebook's Flyers seem to be, except I can't fix it with aggressive spamassasin rules.
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Isn't this supposed to be targeted? These all seem to target single, stupid, bi-curious, poor, gullible, and desperate people, and I'm pretty sure I only fall in, at most, three of those categories.
Seriously, what the fuck.
When I originally wrote the Facebook demo application "Why are you awesome?" 
I wrote it in PHP4 in about 3 hours and hated myself for every one of those miserable 180 minutes. Since then however, I've been slowly and methodically working on a new, JSON-based, Facebook client library (Mono.Facebook.Platform) specifically to bring together some of the aspects of pyfacebook, the PHP client, and the Facebook Toolkit that I like (implementation progress can be found in the NOTES). After getting some of the key Facebook calls implemented to support "Why are you awesome?" I figured I might as well give it a whirl and see if a "real" application would work on top of the library (it does).
Thus far, all that were needed as far as library calls were:
- feed.publishActionOfUser
- notifications.send
- fql.query
- profile.setFBML
A couple of the things I've found thus far in my work have been, that writing a library that you have to use forces you to think about what you add and what you remove a lot more and focus on simplicity and extensibility; secondly, JSON is much faster, meaning I can do things with the Mono.Facebook.Platform library that I couldn't with the XML-based PHP4/5 library. Operations like fetching the user IDs of all 700 friends of mine complete in a timely fashion under the JSON library, whereas they typically timeout with the XML-based libraries.
The Mono.Facebook.Platform library isn't even alpha, it's in negative greek letters right now, there's not enough of the API implemented, and it doesn't handle errors very well at all, so don't use it. When it's finished however, I intend to support over 90% of the Facebook calls, and offer it up as a faster, viable option, for ASP.NET developers on Windows and on Mono.
Of course if you want to check out "Why are you awesome?", head on over to the application page and install it.
One of my favorite Facebookers, Ari Steinberg, just resolved bug #7 in Facebook's bugzilla.
LIMIT, OFFSET, and ORDER BY are all implemented.
docs at http://developers.facebook.com/documentation.php?v=1.0&doc=fql are updated. enjoy guys, and let me know if there are any problems with it. tyler, don't go too crazy with it...keep in mind that order by in particular can be an expensive operation (but do try it out - when used in the appropriate ways it could lead to a savings)
When used correctly, LIMIT, OFFSET and ORDER BY can really make writing application-level code much easier, because you're offloading a lot more onto Facebook. For example, instead of fetching an entire list of people (presumably friends) and then sorting by their name, you can perform a query like:
This query will fetch an alphabetically sorted list of $UID's friends along with their uid, preventing any sorting you might need to do.
Make sure you check the FQL documentation for which "columns" are keyed such that you perform the most optimal queries possible. Of course, you should already make sure you're selecting as often as possible on keyed "columns" in FQL, but when you're offloading large amounts of sorting onto Facebook's API servers, it becomes more important to form optimal queries to make sure that you can fetch data from Facebook as fast as possible and render your application's pages.
Another fun query that becomes more fun with ORDER BY is fetching events for a particular user:
This of course is using ORDER BY on the event.name "column" which is not keyed so it will theoretically perform slower than the example above, but it's far less likely that a user will have thousands of events versus thousands of friends, so the real-world performance hit will be negligible.
As as side note, Ari was on stage with me at Graphing Social, helping me give the Facebook App Development 101 workshop a few weeks ago. You can regularly find him cruising through bugzilla and every so often on the #facebook channel on Freenode.
I figured I'd inform anybody that attended my Facebook App Development 101 workshop at Graphing Social, that I have finally deleted the workshop test accounts that were located at workshop.monkeypox.org.
I have made a backup of the database that we used to play around with the "Why are you awesome?" source code, and I have also backed up the files, so in case you forgot to get your modified files drop me a line and I'll fish your data out.
