Don’t forget: TSOT’s first Ruby/Rails project night takes place next Tuesday! Admission is free, but space is limited, so sign up now!

The Quick Version

TSOT Ruby/Rails Night
Tuesday, January 8th, 2008 (and the second Tuesday of every month)
@ TSOT’s office — 151 Bloor Street West (on the south side, just east of Avenue Road)
11th floor
Door open and food at 5:30 p.m.
Presentations start at 6-ish
FREE ADMISSION (but limited space)
To register, please email joey.devilla@tsotinc.com

About TSOT

TSOT is a Toronto-based start-up that develops — look out, here come the buzzwords — social networking applications using Ruby on Rails. Our first applications are FraternityLive and SororityLive, social software built specifically for people in fraternities and sororities. Both apps are currently being tested with a userbase of thousands of university students and alumni, and we expect to release them in early 2008.

About Ruby/Rails Project Nights

We believe that it’s good for Toronto to have a healthy developer ecosystem — it’s good not only for us as a Toronto-based development shop, but also as a group of developers who are passionate about the work we do. We’d like to see Toronto as “Silicon Valley++” — with the vibrant high-tech scene, but with all the amenities that make Toronto a better place to live than the Valley (such as not being a dreary 50-mile stretch of suburbia and having decent places to go at night).

Hence our contribution to the local developer scene: TSOT Ruby/Rails Project Nights, which will take place on the second Tuesday of every month. They’ll feature in-depth presentations by developers working on interesting projects — primarily Ruby and Ruby on Rails — along with drinks and munchies and a chance to socialize with your fellow developers. They’ll be hosted by Yours Truly, TSOT developer and DemoCamp regular Joey “Accordion Guy” deVilla.

The First Night: Next Tuesday, January 8th

This first Ruby/Rails Night will feature presentations by a couple of Ruby/Rails local heroes on their current Ruby/Rails projects:

• Andrew Burke
• The developers from Unspace
• …and a quick presentation by Joey deVilla called “Do the Stupidest Thing That Could Possibly Work”.

The doors will open at 5:30, the first presentation will start at about 6, and we hope to wrap up the evening by 8:30 or 9. We’ll provide food and drinks, and if there’s enough of a demand, we can always go out to a nearby pub afterwards. There’s no cost to attend (but be advised that seating is limited).

If you’ve been thinking about making a Ruby or Rails presentation (perhaps you want to rehearse for RailsConf 2008!), we’d like to have you present it at one of our project nights!

Add TSOT Ruby/Rails Nights to your list of New Year’s resolutions!

How Do I Register?

Registration is free, but space is limited. To register for the upcoming Jan 8th gathering, please email joey.devilla@tsotinc.com

For More Information

For more information about TSOT Project Nights, please contact:

• Joey deVilla, Senior Developer (joey.devilla@tsotinc.com)
• Corina Newby, Public Relations Officer (corina.newby@tsotinc.com)

The event is also listed on Upcoming.org.

Here’s a quick reminder about TSOT’s upcoming Ruby/Rails night, which takes place on Tuesday, January 8th, 2008:

TSOT Ruby/Rails Night
Tuesday, January 8th, 2008 (and the second Tuesday of every month)
@ TSOT’s office — 151 Bloor Street West (on the south side, just east of Avenue Road)
11th floor
Door open and food at 5:30 p.m.
Presentations start at 6-ish
FREE ADMISSION (but limited space)
To register, please email joey.devilla@tsotinc.com

For more details, see this entry or this page on Upcoming.org.

The Quick Version

TSOT Ruby/Rails Night
Tuesday, January 8th, 2008 (and the second Tuesday of every month)
@ TSOT’s office — 151 Bloor Street West (on the south side, just east of Avenue Road)
11th floor
Door open and food at 5:30 p.m.
Presentations start at 6-ish
FREE ADMISSION (but limited space)
To register, please email joey.devilla@tsotinc.com

About TSOT

TSOT is a Toronto-based start-up that develops — look out, here come the buzzwords — social networking applications using Ruby on Rails. Our first applications are FraternityLive and SororityLive, social software built specifically for people in fraternities and sororities. Both apps are currently being tested with a userbase of thousands of university students and alumni, and we expect to release them in early 2008.

About Ruby/Rails Project Nights

We believe that it’s good for Toronto to have a healthy developer ecosystem — it’s good not only for us as a Toronto-based development shop, but also as a group of developers who are passionate about the work we do. We’d like to see Toronto as “Silicon Valley++” — with the vibrant high-tech scene, but with all the amenities that make Toronto a better place to live than the Valley (such as not being a dreary 50-mile stretch of suburbia and having decent places to go at night).

Hence our contribution to the local developer scene: TSOT Ruby/Rails Project Nights, which will take place on the second Tuesday of every month. They’ll feature in-depth presentations by developers working on interesting projects — primarily Ruby and Ruby on Rails — along with drinks and munchies and a chance to socialize with your fellow developers. They’ll be hosted by Yours Truly, TSOT developer and DemoCamp regular Joey “Accordion Guy” deVilla.

The First Night: Tuesday, January 8th

This first Ruby/Rails Night will feature presentations by a couple of Ruby/Rails local heroes on their current Ruby/Rails projects:

• Andrew Burke
• The developers from Unspace
• …and a quick presentation by Joey deVilla called “Do the Stupidest Thing That Could Possibly Work”.

The doors will open at 5:30, the first presentation will start at about 6, and we hope to wrap up the evening by 8:30 or 9. We’ll provide food and drinks, and if there’s enough of a demand, we can always go out to a nearby pub afterwards. There’s no cost to attend (but be advised that seating is limited).

If you’ve been thinking about making a Ruby or Rails presentation (perhaps you want to rehearse for RailsConf 2008!), we’d like to have you present it at one of our project nights!

Add TSOT Ruby/Rails Nights to your list of New Year’s resolutions!

How Do I Register?

Registration is free, but space is limited. To register for the upcoming Jan 8th gathering, please email joey.devilla@tsotinc.com

For More Information

For more information about TSOT Project Nights, please contact:

• Joey deVilla, Senior Developer (joey.devilla@tsotinc.com)
• Corina Newby, Public Relations Officer (corina.newby@tsotinc.com)

The event is also listed on Upcoming.org.

Don’t forget — DemoCamp 16, the show-and-tell and networking event for Toronto’s tech community takes place tonight at the Toronto Board of Trade in First Canadian Place.

As of this writing, there are 51 free tickets remaining, after which you’ll need to purchase one of the 74 outstanding $10 tickets. You can order a ticket on DemoCamp’s EventBrite page.

For more details about what’s happening tonight, see this entry.

Sometimes it’s hard to believe, but it’s true: this Monday, December 3rd, we’ll be hosting the 16th DemoCamp at the Toronto Board of Trade (located in First Canadian Place). What started as a boardroom gathering of a couple of dozen Toronto-area developers showing their current projects to their peers has grown into the city’s premier techie networking event, and the inspiration for other local “Camp”-type gatherings.

Here’s the schedule of events:

Although the Toronto Board of Trade’s meeting room is very large (and has a cash bar to boot!), it has a limited capacity. If you want to attend DemoCamp, you need to sign up on the EventBrite board. As of this writing, there are 59 free attendance slots remaining; if those get used up, there are 78 $10 donation slots, the money from which will be used to help pay for the venue rental.

Some Quick Explanations

Demos are five-minute presentations where the presenter demonstrates one of his or her current projects in action. This isn’t your ordinary presentation: we only want to see your software in action — no slides are allowed! Think of demos as a geeky show-and-tell showing actual software in action rather than a marketing slideshow with a lot of handwaving.

Ignite Presentations are rapid-fire presentations in which the presenter talks over a set of 20 slides that are timed so that each is shown for 15 seconds (the slideshow runs automatically; the presenter just does the talking). The format helps to ensure that the presentations are interesting and get to the point!

And now, the demos and presentations…

Demos

Teaching Test Driven Development with UTest (Igor Foox)

UTest is a tool developed at the University of Toronto to allow students to submit test cases to be run against a professor’s solution to a programming assignment. We will be demoing UTest, as well as an Eclipse plug-in for UTest and explaining how we think it will help undergrad computer science students learn TDD. The community will get to see a new tool to improve the testing skills of their future employees! They will be able to tell us their feedback and so indirectly influence the skills that students graduating in a few years will have.

Sketch Based 3D Modeling with ShapeShop (Ryan Schmidt)

Shapeshop’s demo video. Can’t see the video? Click here.

I will demo a 3D “sketch-based” modeling system called ShapeShop that anyone can learn to use, and scales from simple toy models to significant complexity. Think Google SketchUp, but for everything from CAD to complex organic characters, instead of just blocky shapes.

I have been building it as part of my MSc/PhD research, since 2004. It is under active development, there have been 2 public releases and I just started releasing betas of version 3. My demo should be selected because everyone I have ever shown it to has enjoyed it, from 6-year olds to jaded computer graphics researchers. Also, it’s a good example of what is possible in university research environments.

The community will get a sense of where 3D modeling and user interfaces might be going in the future, and learn about some of the other stuff happening in the UofT lab that BumpTop came out of. They will also get some new software, because ShapeShop is free. 3D modeling software is really hard to use. I have spoken to lots of tech people who maybe want to make a 3D logo, so they try Blender, and it’s incomprehensible, so they give up. ShapeShop isn’t like that – a real, non-trivial model can be sketched in seconds. And it’s fun. And learning the basic interface is extremely easy. When I get kids using ShapeShop on a SmartBoard, we always have to tear them away. So, I’m pretty sure I can “wow” the democamp crowd. As for inspire, the only thing I can say is that I have recently been demo’ing ShapeShop at UofT recruitment events, and there is always a jump in downloads the next day. So, hopefully some people might be inspired to give 3D modeling another try. I guess it might also inspire other students to try to turn some of their projects/research into usable software.

Last but not least, I might have some huge new top-secret features that I will release during the demo, but I can’t promise anything until Monday when the conference reviews come back…

HealthSpoke Demo (Dan Donovan)

We will be demonstrating an early version of the HealthSpoke practice management and integrated wellness application. We will focus on some of the automated test tools (NUnit, WatiN) we are using and frameworks (Microsoft Application Blocks) that make our development life easier. This will give the community another example of the application of these tools to real-world projects, and hopefully give people some ideas on tools they can try as well.

Coming from Waterloo, I am looking to get involved in the Toronto tech / startup scene, and DemoCamp sounds like a great opportunity. We are working on an interesting Web 2.0 / Social Networking application applied to a niche market. Our presentation will provoke some thought on automated test frameworks, and how these can be implemented with limited resources from Day 1!

Web Groups – Virtual Team Collaboration (Scott Annan, Mercury Grove)

My name is Scott Annan and I have been involved in the camp scene for the last 2 years and an active member of the Ottawa startup scene, (where I live). I have also introduced and organized the democamp concept in Cincinnati and Lexington, KY.

I will be doing a demo of our Web Groups collaboration software which is used by over a dozen fortune-500 companies and several more small businesses ranging from floral consultants to international advertising agencies. I would like to provide a perspective on how we financed our business through consulting, and are purposely growing it without ANY investment in a traditional sales team or marketing (including Adwords). We may be able to use DemoCamp to make a new release / killer feature announcement.

SlashID – Anonymous Identity Provider (Zeev Lieber)

We will demonstrate a fully AJAX-based Identity Management system which allows you to manage your passwords and personal data without disclosing them to our own server. Our approach to authentication and identity management differs from traditional ones in that nobody has to ever rely on us or trust us in any way to complete user authentication and personal data disclosure to different web services. We believe that SlashID is the right way to do identity management in the internet setting (as opposed to enterprise setting), since people are becoming increasingly aware of privacy and trust issues.

We want to raise awareness of our approach with the community, and demonstrate the benefits that our system provides to the websites – ease of registration, one click login, single sign on and keeping user’s data always up to date. All these result in better user experience and more users willing to register – which may translate to direct profit for commercial websites. While the procedure of logging in to a website has always been a hassle rather than something inspiring, we believe we can clearly show that hassle going away. We will show how you can login to any SlashID-enabled website with a single click.

We will also show how updating your personal data on our website automatically propagates to all websites you registered with. All this is possible to do from any computer with just a browser. No data stored on your computer, no data disclosed to our server, no plugin installation required. Our system was launched October 16th, and is available at our website.

Ignite Presentations

Co-Creating the Creative City (Mark Kuznicki)

Richard Florida, author of Rise of the Creative Class and Flight of the Creative Class now calls Toronto home. How can creative people – from artists to software developers – be engaged in the act of city-building? This presentation is intended to quickly get the community up to speed on the creative city idea and to inspire them to participate in making Toronto a better place to create.

By showing the connections between DemoCamp/BarCamp and Burning Man, I hope to shift the perceptions of the community to see how an artist and a developer might have values and interests in common, and to inspire the audience to find the spark of their creative souls while making the city a better place to live and work.

Understanding What Is and Isn’t Critical (Fraser Kelton, Adaptive Blue)

In a start-up, where resources are always tight, it’s important to understand what’s critical and what’s not needed. This Ignite Presentation will explore lessons learned (so far) while building our start-up. It’s a study in what we know now, what we didn’t know then, and what we (luckily) got right all along. The goal is to help the democamp community understand what is and isn’t necessary for building a web start-up. From product development to building community, biz dev to IT infrastructure, human resources to pitching VCs… all done in 20 slides. In 5 min.

This presentation should be selected because what we’ve learned over the past year will benefit many start-ups. The learning has occurred through a mix of hard work, serendipitous events, painful mistakes, and reflective moments and we’d like to share these lessons with the community in a fun, 5 min, presentation. Contrasting what we have and what we don’t gives some insight into what is necessary and what a start-up can do without. We have over one million downloads of our first product. We don’t have a single server. We have people in three countries. We don’t have an office. We have a CEO who handles front-line support. We don’t have company email… and so on.

The presentation will entertainingly explore how we got to where we are today by loving constraint and learning to bravely question everything. Inspiring tales, told over 15 seconds, drills home what is and isn’t critical to growing an idea into a company.

[Cross-posted to The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.]

The crowd at FacebookCamp Toronto 2.
Photo taken by Joseph Thornley — click it to see the original on its Flickr page.

And now, the last of my notes from yesterday’s FacebookCamp Toronto 2. If you missed the first two parts, follow the links below:

• Notes from FaceBookCamp Toronto 2, Part 1
• Notes from FaceBookCamp Toronto 2, Part 2

Monetizing your Facebook Application (Greg Thomson)

• What does he consider a “failed app”? “An app that has less than 10K active users”.
• What does he consider a success? An app with about 250,000 installs. With that, he says he “could go full time”.
• What’s an active user worth per year? “About $3″.
• “You can’t just throw one banner up and hope to make it.”

Case Study: “My Garden” App:

• Each flower was worth a certain number of coins
• Each user has an allotment of coins — extra coins had to be paid with cash
• The scheme to make money through coin sales didn’t work — “In my experience, users will generally not pay for things.”

• Across his apps — the big one being “My Aquarium” — the installed base progression was from 0 to 250,000 to 8 million installs across apps
• Did not add ads until his installed base hit the 250,000 mark, and he regrets that
• Why wait so long before adding advertising? He was worried that they might drive users away.
• This was not the case: users are used to ads
• There is a hidden upside to starting late: he didn’t get discouraged at the beginning when ad revenues would have been small.
• The money he’s making covers costs of servers “definitely starting to mount”
• “You really need large numbers to effectively monetize applications.”
• Some demographics:
  • 60% of the users generate of 90% of revenue
  • 30% generate zero revenue
  • The country breakdown of his users:
    • U.K.: 20%
    • U.S.: 20% — These users represent the best monetization opportunities — try to increase them!
    • Canada: 20%
    • Other countries: 40%

Revenue basics:

• Appsaholic (Social media) — pay per click — average $0.10/click
• Adsense (Google) — pay per click — average $0.07/click
• Adsense worked well with “My Garden”, since its theme tended to result in relevant ads — ads for florists and the like.
• Adsense didn’t work well for “My Aquarium”, since “people don’t really send each other fish” in real life, and the ads weren’t relevant.
• Incentivize your users to complete offers: give them rewards in exchange for their completing surveys, which generate revenue

Create a new want:

• Most of the popular applications are entertainment-based
• Revnues for apps go through a cycle: start / peak / decline / plateau
• One way to avoid or at least forestall plateaus is to cycle through ads — change them up often
• You have to keep putting new stuff up — both content and ads
• Change things! Vary the order of ads, or run slightly different ads — any variation helps!

What else?

• Cross-promote other apps in your app to generate new users — he does this
• In his experience — he can deliver 50,000 installs for other apps because of his user base
• If your app is a good fit, you have the opportunity to do custom advertising with large brands — such as the “Zombies” app, which got sponsored by Resident Evil
• Use A/B testing to maximize revenue — show 2 different variations of an ad — see which performs the best

Selling your app

• No major acquisitions just yet
• There was talk of the “Where I’ve Been” app getting bought, but it hasn’t happened yet
• Expect to get $1 per installed user or $10 per daily active user
• You should:
  • Have a base of banners
  • Build incentivizable offers
  • Get surveys through affiliate networks
• Note that a lot of offers are not incentivizable

• Up until a week and a half ago — all users on 1 app server and 1 DB server
• There are 10 rendering servers for Flash and jpegs

• What his time to market? “Keep it to a week. More than a week? The odds of failure go up dramatically.”
• How long to 250,000 users? “2 weeks”.
• How long to 8 million users? “Been doing this for 3 months now.”
• His operating costs? For servers — $2,500 a month

Secrets of PayPal interface used by Gift Cards Facebook Application (Steve Pritchard)

Background

• His “Gift Cards” application was a convergence of business opportunities:
  • He had a Toronto business associate with abundance of gift cards to give
  • Toronto has a high density of active Facebook users (remember, it’s the #2 Facebook city after London)
  • Obvious application fit for his business
• The application cried out for PayPal interface
• Wanted to offer a simple payment scheme
• Wanted to avoid complex HTTPS interactions
• “Challenged by the challenge”

Challenges

• PayPal data does not fit on Facebook Canvas
• Required pop-up window
• Had to be done with IFRAME; and the canvas and IFRAME cannot communicate
• PayPal pop-up window must have specified dimensions
• Have to update canvas under all PayPal termination conditions
• Had to sync 3 threads on 4 subsystems

Solutions

• Solution: Get user to click twice:
  • First click to start the PayPal/Facebook sync loop
  • Second click to open the PayPal pop-up window
• Gift Cards server mediates
• Again, a click-twice user interface:
  • First click to start Facebook canvas polling cycle
  • The canvas’ PayPal “checkout” button is replaced with an IFRAME version
  • Then, the intermediate step of asking user to confirm amount
  • Generates 2nd click

Q & A

• How long did it to develop? “I was learning Facebook, I was learning Paypal…so about a week.”

Ami Vora making her presentation. Image taken from Pink Internet Marketing.

Here’s part 2 of my notes from last night’s FacebookCamp Toronto 2 sessions. In case you missed part one, it’s here.

Building an App for Your Brand (Janice Diner and Michael Scissons, Segal Communications)

Segal Communications:

• What they do: “Create experiences that help companies build brands and generate sales”
• Showed video of Segal’s work:
  • Club kids
  • Hip hop soundtrack
  • Images of events and apps
  • Split it — testimonials

The advertiser’s view:

• Brands are either on Facebook or thinking about getting on Facebook
• They still get some calls along the lines of: “I want my ad put on people’s profiles”
• They work with brands to figure out “how to engage in this space”

Facebook applications

• Top 44 apps = 200M installations
• 16M daily active application users

Brands have these advertising options on Facebook:

• Sponsored stories
• Graphical ad units (a.k.a. “banners”)
• Sponsored groups
• Flyers
• Branded app dev

Estimates:

• 100s of millions of dollars have already been spent by brands on Facebook (source: eMarketer)
• It is expected that $1 billion will be spent by brands on Facebook by the end of 2009 (source: eMarketer)
• There are more than 41 million active Facebook users

Inroducing Janice: Creative Director

• She’s been “playing w/ brands on Facebook for close to a year”

Apps engage users in a number of ways, among them:

• Social experience
• Personal publishing

Branded apps they’ve worked on include:

• A “Rock Paper Scissors” game for Red Bull called Roshambull
• A political views survey for the Washington Post called The Compass
• A college roomate expense-sharing assistant for TD Canada Trust bank called Split It

Brand Social Network

• The idea is to link a brand to an experience that is social in nature
• How? By connect brands with Facebook’s social graph
• The hope is to create community of “brand ambassadors”

Brand opportunity

• Facebook presents a new opportunity to connect brands with consumers
• It may also present new revenue models

• There aren’t many branded apps yet
• Many are still in development

Red Bull’s Roshambull app:

• 360,000 installs
• For the day of October 6th, 7000 people played it
• “Our goal was to create an app that users would enjoy having on their profiles and would want to share with their friends”

Washington Post’s The Compass

• A “political compass”-style app

TD Canada Trust’s Split It

• Aimed at students, who have a hard time asking for/sharing money
• Allows students sharing a residence to track expenses and split bills on Facebook
• Launched August 2007, still looking to build user base

Brand apps get consumers talking:

• More and more companies will be designing their own Facebook apps
• Designing and spreading an app requires a unique set of skills
• Success requires a solid understanding of consumer needs and wants
• Segal: “Helping brands develop the ideal Facebook advertising solution”

Marketing Your Application Inside Facebook (Roy Pereira)

• At the last FacebookCamp Toronto, Facebook rep Megan Marks said that there were “at least 12 different touch points for your application inside Facebook”.
• What are these 12 ways?

Simple Advertising

• Banners
• Flyers (very cost-effective)
• Sponsored news stories
• Sponsored groups

Advertising in other applications

• Banners in applications
• Ads in profile box

Application Directory (”The boring way” / “Like going through the telephone book”)

• What you say in the description, the name of your app, the icon — all go a long way

Application “Add” Page

• Needs to be interesting
• Look at “Compare People” (interesting) vs. “Neighborhoods” (Not so interesting)

Profile Page

• Add the URLs for your apps in your profile’s “Web Sites” section

Status Updates

• Promote your app in your status updates: “X is happy about his Y application”

• Message Attachments — to wall or email
• Invite requests

Notifications

• Different from news feed
• Directed at a user

(External) Emails

• Probably going to be deprecated by Facebook

Mini-Feed (”By far the best way”)

• Mini-Feed is shown only on a user’s profile
• Mini-Feed does not have any view/post restrictions like Newsfeed
• Not too many apps publish to the Mini-Feed (publishStoryToUser vs. publishActionOfUser for newsfeeds)

Newsfeed — guess of what you want to see

• Newsfeed uses rules — is based on:
  • the actions your friends take
  • the privacy settings of everyone involved
• Send lots of feeds — use photos — make relevant to events that triggered them

Analyzing the Top Applications (Jesse Hirsch)

• Actually, don’t look just at the top, but the “mushy middle”
• Facebook is a “Social Operating System” — and as an emerging ecosystem, it needs diversity to survive and thrive
• When viewing your user base, consider “Total users” vs “Active users”
• Active users are those who touch your app every day
• The long tail still applies in the Facebook ecosystem — see O’Reilly’s active user drop off graph

Application Approach 1: Filling a Void

• These are apps that fill some kind of need not filled by any other Facebook feature of application
• They have “First past the post” momentum

Application Approach 2: Infectiousness

• Simple – Easy to understand
• Social – Involve action towards a friend
• Viral – Each action encourages a new user to repeat cycle
• Involve contests and competitions that reward participation

Application Approach 3: Exchanges and Expression

• With our friends, we engage in a shared daily narrative and collaborate on building a semi-public stage upon which to act out
• The same need drives blogging and LiveJournal

Application Approach 4: Integration and Enhancement

• Success often results from the relevance of the content for users in general as well as a balance when it comes to messaging and notification

Application Approach 5: Ratings, Reviews and Favorites

• Social hierarchy is important — an organizing principle — consider the “Top Friends” app
• Taxonomy or folksonomy adds layers of value

Successful apps are:

• Original – they are unique and useful
• Infections – they encourage social transfer and promotion
• Engaging – they facilitate ongoing use and acceptance
• Integrated – they have relevance and add value
• Empowering – they offer control and allow organization

Last night was the second FacebookCamp Toronto, and I took notes. Here’s the first part, with more to follow later today…

Introductory Presentation

The introductory presentation was made by the FacebookCamp Toronto organizers: Roy Pereira, Colin Smillie and Andrew Cherwenka.

They thanks the event sponsors:

• Facebook
• Segal
• Refresh Partners
• Trapeze
• MaRS

Some updates on things that have happened since the last FacebookCamp Toronto:

• There are now more than 43 million active users
• fbFund has been established:
  • $10M in capital (may grow over time)
  • Accepting applications for grants from US$25K – US$250K
• FBML 1.1 and FB JavaScript have been released

Here’s what the Facebook application scene looks like right now:

• About 5,500 approved applications:
  • 84 of these apps account for 90% of the usage
  • At this point, “It’s anyone’s game”
• The primary measure of an application is no longer installs, but now daily active users
• Having good functionality is now up there with being first (e.g. Consider the number of “wishlist”-type apps — there are about 18)
• 9 of the top 20 apps come from from the same development shop

They showed a chart of the top 30 Facebook cities (in terms of membership), 9 of which are Canadian. The top five Facebook cities are:

1. London, UK
2. Toronto, Ontario, Canada
3. Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
4. New York, New York, USA
5. Chicago, Illinois, USA

In August 2007, Canada beat the UK for monthly visits to Facebook.

There are a number of upcoming FacebookCamps:

• Vancouver: October 23rd
• Montreal: November 7
• Toronto: Early December 2007

There are also plans for a Toronto “FacebookWeekend”, a full-weekend developer workshop — perhaps in early December 2007.

Facebook Application Best Practices (Ami Vora, Facebook)

Who am I?

• The lead of Platform Product Marketing for Facebook
• Her job: make sure the developers out there are successful and that the developer community is healthy and growing

Facebook, as a whole, is…

• A tech company intent on building a social utility
• 45 million active users (that’s up from 34 million, which was the figure at the last FacebookCamp Toronto)
• 250,000 new users sign on every day, which means there’s a 3% week-on-week growth

Who are the new users?

• They’re typically age 25 and older
• Everywhere outside the U.S. — that is, in places where Facebook didn’t get its start in universities — there’s even distribution of ages for Facebook users

Stats

• U.S.: 18 million users
• Canada: 6 million (”That one in every 5 Canadians!”)
• U.K. 5 million
• 60 billion pages served a month
• More than 50% of our users visit at least once daily

The Social Graph

• What makes people come back to the site?
• For them, it’s all about the social graph: the network of connections in the real world through which people communicate and share info
• In Facebook, they’re trying to create an accurate online analog of people’s real-world social graphs
• Value of the social graph to photos:
  • Facebook’s “Photos” app is relatively simple compared to other photo-sharing sites — you can only upload and share
  • In spite of its lack of features, it still has more activity than other photo sites
  • Why? Facebook’s social graph
  • There’s a social context attached to the photos — you can tag the photo, specifying with who’s in it, and the tagged people are told that they’ve been tagged
  • Photos become social content
  • Photos are shared with exactly the people who are interested in them
• Value of the social graph to events
  • Facebook’s “Events” app is relatively simple compared to other event-announcing sites
  • Once again, in spite of a lack of features, they see more event traffic than competitors (for example, they get 3 times eVite’s pageviews)

The Facebook platform provides 3 things:

1. Mass distribution
2. Deep integration
3. New opportunities

• They’ve tried to open every integration point available to their own developers to all outside developers
• When developing a Facebook app, think about the value you’re adding to the user experience

Best practices for Facebook features:

• Mini-Feed:
  • Good for “temporal information”
  • Used by people looking for the latest info about me
  • If your app posts items to the Mini-feed, include a friend of the user’s where possible (e.g. “Pete Forde tagged Joey in 2 photos.”)
• Profile Box:
  • Not really for content
  • It’s a representation of the user
• Canvas Page:
  • Use for heavy information
  • Use it for interaction to build connections
• News Feed:
  • Shows connections
  • Great driver for future engagement — shows a preview of what you’ll see if you dive in

Opportunities — Building a business online, you’re concerned with

• Growth
  • Access to millions of potential users
  • Viral distribution through the social graph
• Engagement
  • 50% daily return rate
  • Social context provides opportunity for engaging content
• Monetization
  • Freedom
  • Several monetization paths:
    • Relationship with an ad network
    • Partnership with a brand advertiser
    • Cross-promotion
    • Institutional investment
    • fbFund

fbFund

• Meant to lower the barrier to entry
• Small no-equity grants
• Not Facebook’s money, but the money of early funders of Facebook
• Right of first refusal to fbFund companies

Advice

• Provide engaging content / focus on the social
• Provide relevant info
• Showcase interactions between users (”Everyone loves a little voyeurism”)
• Focus on usability
• Keep providing your users with fresh content
• One good idea for fresh content: turn-based games
• Use the integration points into Facebook well
• Iterate often
• Think about intelligent promotion
• Incorporate privacy:
  • Think of privacy as an asset, not as something that weighs you down
  • Users are more willing to interact if they feel their privacy is being protected/respected

Platform growth

• 4000+ applications
• 100 new applications added per day
• 80,000 developer keys
• 80% of users have added at least one application (which means that users think of apps as a key part of their Facebook experience)

This is just the beginning!

• “We’re only 4 months in, and we have a long way to go.”
• We’ve all got the same users — we’re all trying to build the same user experience — our success is contingent upon each other.

The Q&A Session

Ami, on the relationships represented in Facebook: “‘We hooked up’ is not the best relationship descriptor.”

On limiting the clutter presented by all the apps:

• A hard problem — considered it when they first decided to open Facebook to third-party apps
• Try to keep the profile clean
• You have free rein on the Canvas page
• Note that if you collapse an app on your own profile, it’s collapsed on all the other profiles you see

Q: Any other incentives other than fbFund?

• The goal is really to create an open market where incentives come to exist
• Don’t really want to be in the incentive business themselves

The second FacebookCamp Toronto — a gathering for local techies interested in developing Facebook applications — takes place next Tuesday, October 9th, at the MaRS Centre (101 College Street, a stone’s throw from Queen’s park subway station). I was at the first FaceBookCamp Toronto, and if you’d like to see my notes, they’re here.

Speakers will include:

• Ami Vora (Corporate Communications, Developer PR) from Facebook Inc., flying in from Palo Alto
• Janice Diner (Creative Director) and Michael Scissons (Director of National Sales) from Segal Communications
• Geoffrey B. Roche (President) from Lowe Roche

The last FacebookCamp was quite tech-heavy — the one, while still aimed at developing applications, will be more focused on the business, marketing, branding and promotional aspects. Here’s the schedule:

• 6:00 – Social/Mingling
• 6:30 – Intro – update from last FBCT (Roy Pereira / Colin Smillie /Andrew Cherwenka)
• 6:35 – High level presentation on platform and best-practices (Ami Vora – Facebook Inc.)
• 6:55 – Building an Application for a Brand (Michael Scissons & Janice Diner – Segal Communications)
• 7:15 – How Many ways can you Market your Application Inside Facebook? (Roy Pereira)
• 7:30 – Top Applications and Why They Work (Jesse Hirsh)
• 7:45 – Monetizing your Facebook Application (Greg Thomson)
• 8:00 – Secrets of PayPal interface used by Gift Cards Facebook Application (Steve Pritchard)
• 8:15 – Demos: 5 minutes each ( 3 Slots )
  • Demo #1 – Dogbook / Catbook (Geoffrey B. Roche)
  • Demo #2 – WishList (Bogdan Arsenie)
  • Demo #3 – DreamBook (Phil Tucker)

For more information, consult the event’s Facebook page or its wiki page. See you there!

Well, tomorrow’s the big night — the second annual bowling tournament where Atlanta-area Furries take on Atlanta-area Klingons takes place at Midtown Bowl (1936 Piedmont Cir NE, Atlanta, Georgia). A hearty Qa’pla! and Meow! to all who are attending!

Someone set up a poll at Poll Boutique where you can vote for your favourite team. As of this writing, the Furries and Klingons are dead even, each with 50% of the vote.

In honour of this weekend’s event, I would like to share the most appropriate music in my collection for this event: the ever-lovin’
Star Trek Fight Music [1.8MB MP3]. Enjoy!

Don’t you hate discovering an interesting party just after you’ve confirmed your plans for the weekend?

Click to see the image on its original page.

This Saturday, the MurrFurr Furries will take on the USS Republic Klingons in their second annual bowling competition at Midtown Bowl in Atlanta, Georgia. Attendees are encouraged to come in their suits, whether furry or Klingon.

If only this were available on pay-per-view…

FacebookCamp

The calm before the storm: the MaRS centre auditorum before people arrived.

Last night’s FacebookCamp was a success, packing the main auditorium of Toronto’s MaRS Centre (which was ready to seat 420 people) as well as spilling over into an extra room with simulcast video. It’s estimated that about 450 people attended, which makes this event the largest “Camp” style developer event ever held in Toronto.

15 minutes before the opening presentation.

Rather than comment on the event right now, let me jump into the notes! I’ll talk about the event in a later post.

Introduction (Andrew Cherwenka of Trapeze.com and Roy Pereira of Refresh Partners)

• Thanks to Facebook for flying up here to a “cooooold” Canadian summer
• Thanks to MaRS for letting us use their space
• The number of people attending grew so much that we had to keep changing venues to accomodate them — MaRS is our fourth venue!

Some facts about Facebook:

• 54+ million users
• 15 billion pageviews/month
• Toronto is the 2nd largest Facebook community in the world, with 724,000 members
• We were recently surpassed by London, but on a per-capita basis, we still beat them
• 5 of the top 10 Facebook regions are Canadian — Winnipeg and Hamilton each have more users than San Francisco!
• 2400+ approved applications representing 100 million downloads

FacebookCamp:

• We hope that this the first of many
• We want to encourage Toronto-based developers and organizations to build for and use Facebook, and leverage it to make money!
• Tonight’s presentations will be more developer-centric and technical in nature
• The next FacebookCamp will be more geared towards marketing and business development — it’ll be sometime in the fall

We’d like to thank our sponsors and those who helped out:

• Facebook
• MaRS
• Trapeze
• Refresh Partners
• David Crow and TorCamp

• This is the first Facebook Developer Garage outside the US

Let’s have a show of hands!

• How many developers in the audience? [About 40% raise their hands]
• How many marketers in the audience? [About 40% raise their hands]
• How many people from outside the GTA (Greater Toronto Area)? [A few hands go up]

• If you’re blogging this event or posting pictures on Flickr, please tag it with FacebookCampToronto so other people can easily find it
• Participate! Add to the Facebook Developer Wiki, and join the TorCamp Google Group.

Best Practices Around Product Design and Viral Marketing (Meagan Marks, Facebook)

Intro by Caitlin O’Farrell, Facebook

• Toronto is home to one of the biggest Facebook developer communities
• We want you to build apps that integrate deeply with Facebook
• We ask that you do not videotape Meagan’s presentation
• I’m excited, a little nervous

Meagan’s Presentation

Who am I?

• My title is Platform Manager
• You can find me on Facebook
• I’m an “appaholic”

Why are we here?

• Developer Garages popping up all over the US
• Facebook is the #1 site in Canada
• Canada: home to 10% of all active Facebook developers
• Toronto is in top 10 largest Facebook developer communities, beating out San Francisco and San Jose for apps with more than 5 users
• 3.3 million active users in Canada (by “active”, we mean users who log in more than once a month)
• 61% of the active users are out of college
• 68% of the active users log in daily
• Facebook gets 8.5 billion pageviews a month from Canada
• In total, there are 33 million active users
• We get 150,000 new users every day
• There are 90,000 Facebook developers
• There are 1700 apps with more than 100 users

• It’s been only a couple of months since the Facebook platform was launched (at f8, in the Bay Area)
• A number of popular apps have spring up since then: Zombies, Pirates, Scrabulous, Crackbook (credit to Amber Mac for that name) and Appsaholic

Facebook Platform:

• What is Facebook Platform?
• Google Maps, OS X dashboard widgets — noth are examples of platforms
• Facebook’s platform is built on the Facebook Social Graph, which is made up of the connections between Facebook users

Facebook cares about:

• Identity
• Information
• Social Context

Ninja Tricks

• Popular apps make use of deep integration with Facebook
• We’ve studied the apps that did best, and here’s a breakdown of how users found them:
  • About 1/4 discovered an app through the News Feed
  • About 1/6 discovered an app through the Profile
  • About 1/6 discovered an app through the Product Directory
  • About 1/3 discovered an app through some other means

Profile integration

• A lot of Facebook’s built-in features are actually apps that are built on the platform
• The Mini Feed is a good way to promote your app — write to it!

Profile Box

• Users want to see recent interactions and be notified of them — who did what?
• If users don’t see updates from your app, they’ll remove it
• Timestamps are important too — users want to know when things happened and about recently added content — notify them!
• Make your notices socially relevant: mention the user’s friends! Users want to know “Who of my friends did something?”
• People use Facebook content for self-expression and as a means social promotion — think about what people want to share
• The Profile is how people share info about themselves
• People post pictures, video and notes — content that is “precious to them”

Canvas Pages

• The Canvas Page is where users are taken when they click on an app
• The idea is for your app to use the Canvas Page to keep a captive audience
• Use “Call to Action” buttons — big buttons that encourage people to initiate some kind of action
• Track the important actions in the feed, e.g. “Alice wrote on Bob’s wall
• Rather than bombard the Feed with lots of tiny actions, aggregate actions together into a single notification for the Feed
• Use social comparisons based on actions, e.g. In a quiz, compare the user’s score with his/her friends’ scores: “Alice is smarter than 20 of her friends”

More Integration Points

There are other less-used integration points in Facebook that you may wish to consider using:

• Message
• Message attachments — e.g., when a user installs a song app like iLike, you can offer to send a friend a song as a message attachment
• Profile actions
• Wall
• Share buttons — call on the user to share the app — no biz deals with Facebook are needed to make use of these

Mass Distribution and Getting Users:

• >75% of active users have at least one Facebook app installed
• The largest app has 10 million users
• The best way to grow your app is to feed the Mini Feed
• Track interactions and push them to the user via feeds, but not so much that you spam the user
• Use the Mini Feed to “show off” — show the user’s friends that they’re missing out by not using your app
• Apps are free, so it’s a low-risk
• The temporal element is important: Note the time someone did something

News Feed Optimization:

• Increase the relevancy of your News Feed items — make sure that those items are things users care about — if 10 of my friends and I are doing the same thing, I want to know about it!

Build apps to promote your core business:

• Example: Boozemail. Seems trivial, but its creators are using it to promote their toolbar to Facilitate meetings
• Cross-promote: Make deals with other developers to promote their apps within your app — Flickster and Top Friends are cross-promoting each other

New Opportunities: Virtual Currencies

• Think of virtual currencies, such as the one in (fluff)friends
• It makes use of a currency called “Munny”
• Users of this app have virtual pets that live on their Profile page
• If you pet my virtual pet or take care of it, you get munny, which can be converted to “food” (virtual food for virtual pets), virtual gifts to send to other (fluff)friends users, and so on
• These are “incentive-based actions” that lead to “interaction capital”
• You also get recognition for your actions: “Meagan has petted pet xxx”
• Use this recognition to let your users build “street cred” or karma
• Red Bull’s Rock-Paper-Scissors game is another good example

New Opportunities: Ad Networks

• You can run ads on your app’s Canvas Page, but not in the Profile
• Impressive CPM: $15/20 CPM for top apps
• Some app developers are showing really good numbers from advertising:
  • Some are quitting their day jobs
  • VCs in the Bay area looking for Facebook app developers
  • Some applications are self-sufficient without an existing base anywhere else on the Web — they’re solely on the Facebook platform

New Opportunities: APIs on APIs (”So meta!”):

• e.g. the Super Wall API, which is an API for their application, which in turn is built on the Facebook API
• Super Wall was created in 3 days and drew in 2 million users in 2 weeks

Metrics to consider: The Facebook Effect

• If you have an external site, you won’t be cannibalizing it by drawing people to your Facebook app
• If anything, Facebook brings traffic to your site
• HotOrNot and RockYou can trace growth back to traffic driven to them from their Facebook apps
• It’s a virtuous cycle, supporting growth both directions

Metrics to consider: Vitality Metrics

• Installed base
• Growth of new users
• Outgoing impressions — note that impressions are not notifications
• Conversion rate

• Your app will get lower numbers if it’s not content-oriented or if it doesn’t have some kind of meaning to your users

Metrics to consider: Engagement Metrics

• Canvas page visits
• Canvas page duration
• Installed users * Impressions/Installed user * Acquisitions/Impressions = New users acquired
• It’s all about connections and network effects
• If you’re keeping your users engaged, that sends out more impressions and attracts more users
• Focus on interactions on the Canvas page rather than outgoing impressions
• Think about engaging your existing users rather than obsessing over growing your user base — “New users is not the be-all and end-all”

In Closing

• Build!
• Get started at developers.facebook.com
• Install the developer app
• Watch the feed on the developer app! It’ll keep you up to date on changes to Facebook that might affect your app
• We’ve removed the “Courses” feature, which dates back to when we were just for colleges: we think the development community can do it better, so we decided to open up that opportunity to the dev community
• Contribute to the wiki — wiki.developers.facebook.com
• You guys are a huge asset
• We’ve seen apps get traction that wouldn’t have gotten it without Facebook

Q & A

Question: What’s the uninstall rate for Facebook apps?

Answer:

• I have the data on my laptop, but haven’t memorized it; see me afterwards
• Uninstall numbers are low and declining
• Certain apps have rapid uninstalls — most of time because they’re spammy
• Apps that are “spammy” — those that send messages that are misleading, damage trust or abuse the relationship with the user — will get their notifications throttled back or disabled by us

Question: What are the top 3 and bottom 3 apps?

Answer:

• Don’t have the numbers memorized
• I believe Top Friends is the number 1 app, with about 10 million users
• You can see for yourself — look at the “Browse Apps” leaderboards for app stats

Question: Do sites that integrate with Facebook have to pay?

Answer: No, it’s free! You have to have your own servers and engineers, though.

Question: Is the “Action” menu being removed?

Answer: If the user doesn’t have an app installed, s/he shouldn’t see it in the profile.

Question: Can you give us any insights into the Facebook roadmap?

Answer: I can only talk about “the state of the world as it is today”.

Question: What’s your stance on “policing” Facebook?

Answer:

• We prefer a “hands-off approach”
• You can’t distribute copyrighted material, as per the terms of service
• Read the terms of service and don’t violate them
• Please settle disputes between you and other app develoeprs (say, “copycat” apps) yourselves

In the Next Installment…

Next time, I’ll post my notes and photos from the other presentations.

Tonight’s the night: Facebook Developer Garage (a.k.a. FacebookCamp) happens tonight at 6:30 p.m. at the Mars Discovery District (101 College Street, Toronto). This will be the first of a series of Facebook Garages/Camps; there’s already talk of holding another one for the fall. If you’re interested in developing applications to run on the Facebook platform, this is a must-catch event, as not only are about 300 local developers planning to attend — the event has garnered so much attention that Facebook is flying reps up to speak. As you can imagine, seating will be limited, so if you can come early, do so.

I’ll be taking my usual copious notes and will post them here, so watch this space!

Here’s the schedule of tonight’s events:

Click this logo to see the event’s Facebook page.

Click this logo to see the event’s wiki page.

It’s the event so anticipated that it had to have more than one name. Whether you call it Facebook Developer Garage Toronto [this links to its Facebook page] or Facebook Camp Toronto [this links to its wiki page], so many Toronto-based developers have expressed an interest in attending that they had to change to a larger venue.

Originally scheduled to take place at No Regrets Cafe and Restaurant (home of a number of DemoCamp Toronto events), Facebook Garage/Camp will now take place at the MaRS Centre (101 College Street, Toronto, just east of Queen’s Park subway station). The event takes place on Tuesday, August 7, 2007, formally starts at 6:30 p.m. and the schedule is listed below:

Facebook Garage/Camp Description and Schedule
Tuesday, August 7, 2007

Please join us to thrash out Facebook Platform: share ideas, troll for partners on your latest project, check out app demonstrations, seek developer support direct from Facebook Developers, or just socialize with people like you.

The Facebook Platform Team will give an introduction to Platform, discuss best practices around product design & viral marketing techniques, and hold a technical Q&A.

Please come ready to share, participate, and absorb new ideas along with other Facebook app developers.

• 6:00 – Social/Mingling
• 6:30 – Introduction by Colin Smillie Roy Pereira and Andrew Cherwenka
• 6:40 – Best Practices around Product Design and Viral Marketing (Meagan Marks, Facebook.com)
• 7:30 – Anatomy of a Facebook Application (Jay Goldman and Michael Glenn, Radiant Core)
• 7:50 – FBML Overview (Sunil Boodram, Trapeze Media)
• 8:10 – FQL Overview (Craig Saila)
• 8:30 – Updating the Facebook Profile (Colin Smillie, Refresh Partners)
• 8:50 – Demo: .Net Sample Application (Ricardo Covo)
• 9:00 – Demo: Carpool by Zimride (Rajat Suri)
• 9:10 – Demo: Ogrant by Shachin Ghelani
• 9:20 – Wrap-up and drinks

The event is free to the public, but they do request that you sign up for the event. The problem is that there are currently two sign-up rosters — one on the Facebook page and one on the wiki page. If you’d like to attend, I suggest that you sign up on both.

Not too long after Richard M. Stallman’s non-technical presentation at the University of Toronto’s Mississauga campus, C++ creator Bjarne Stroustrup will make an extremely technical presentation at University of Toronto’s Downtown campus. He’ll be talking about C++0x Support for Generic Programming.

The presentation will take place on Friday, July 20, 2007 from 6:30pm – 9:30pm at the Bahen Centre for Information Technology, 40 St. George Street, University of Toronto. Admission is free and everyone is welcome (although you probably should have at least a passing familiarity with C++).

After the presentation, we’ll all mosey down to Bar Mercurio restaurant (270 Bloor West) where Bjarne will talk operator overloading and I will discuss alcohol overloading.

On Thursday, July 5th, Free Software Foundation founder Richard M. Stallman will be speaking at the University of Toronto’s Mississauga Campus. His topic will be Copyright vs. Community in the Age of Computer Networks.

The talk is co-sponsored by U of T’s Department of Mathematical and Computational Sciences and Knowledge Media Design Institute. It will be a non-technical talk, and everyone from hard-nerds to laypeople are encouraged to attend.

Here’s the abstract for the talk, taken from Greg Wilson’s blog…

Copyright developed in the age of the printing press, and was designed to fit with the system of centralized copying imposed by the printing press. But the copyright system does not fit well with computer networks, and only draconian punishments can enforce it.

The global corporations that profit from copyright are lobbying for draconian punishments, and to increase their copyright powers, while suppressing public access to technology. But if we seriously hope to serve the only legitimate purpose of copyright—to promote progress, for the benefit of the public—then we must make changes in the other direction.

The presentation will take place on Thursday, July 5th at 5:00 p.m. at Matthews Auditorium, Room 137, Kaneff Center, University of Toronto, 3359 Mississauga Road North, Missisauga. The topic will be free as in speech, and admission will be free as in beer.