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06/03/08 Singapore: Facebook Developers Garage 2
SINGAPORE - Last night I was twittering from the Facebook Developers Garage session in the Microsoft Building at One Marina Boulevard, Singapore. The event was good for meeting a few new people, the panel had some interesting bits - but I would have preferred the dinner after rather than before to have greater chance to network. But a free dinner, who’s complaining!
The most interesting people on the panel were Andrew Wee, Internet Marketing and Kien Lee, Senatus. Kien gave lots of interesting ideas about flipped models - rather than the standard line. He runs lots of large Facebook Apps (typically games) as distributed portal.
In the demo session, students from NUS “Facebook Apps/Evolving Media” presented their Facebook App projects, ‘walls’ and ‘games’ though. Nothing really new, but good to give them a chance to present. I wish I had caught up with Preetam Rai after the session but the event closed straight away. Preetam is a researcher into the Asian social media scene and had been to many of the regional events including BarCamps in India and Cambodia. This was a great session that could have been much longer - I wanted to hear all about the trends. The obvious trend was - this stuff is happening everywhere globally!
Other shout-outs…
I sat with Wilson Hidajat, Wilson Pictures (Post production / Web Development) during the demo session. Wilson - you’re a great guy!
‘Intelligent Design’ on a Nokia N95… Sivam Krish, Genometri was demoing me apps for Nokia that based on photos can design themes for your phone. This was a tiny part of their scope which sounded very interesting.
We got a demo of the Facebook App for RecordTV/Evohub - web video that can detect video jumps/rewinds (the bits people watchover again & again) an interesting metric I want to explore more of. They had two interesting ideas to game Facebook…
“Mentioning multiple connected profiles in the ‘news feed push’ to increase FB rank of the item.”
“A ‘romantic break-up’ is the only event always shown in the Facebook feed no matter on rank. Game it by marrying your own companies ‘profile’ then breakup to show the item in all your contacts feeds.”
Nicole was live-blogging the event from beside me, and has much better photos than my attempt above!
Not only that, but I finished the new site theme last night. You can see it live now!
-Robin.
(Image Credit: The panel at the Facebook Developer Garage II, Singapore.)
Tags: facebook, garag3, garage, microsoft, singapore
2 Comments
31/03/08 Paul Nelligan
Hi Robin
my question re. facebook is.. ‘what’s the big fuss about’??… it seems everyone’s on the facebook bandwagon these days, and I use facebook a lot myself… but from a developers perspective, I don’t really see the attraction… Is there enormous advertising revenues to be gleaned from facebook apps??.. Is the whole thrust right now towards developing mobile apps for facebook??… I can see how this would benefit mobile companies, but not your average developer…
The development language seems very limited in scope, and the apps appear clunky, and difficult to customize… and most of the ones that seem to perform well right now are pretty simple, quite short lived, and are best designed with teenage girls in mind (most developers probably wouldn’t have a problem with a user-centric approach in this case)… I don’t see any advertising on these apps that could benefit the developer, but then, i might have missed something…
From my perspective, the most successful apps are simply the most eye-catching… Personally, the only apps that I add are the ones that I see on my friend’s profiles and think ‘ohh, that one looks like fun’ - and I think the same applies to everyone…. I don’t believe it achieves anything to have to invite many of your friends to use an app in order to get your ‘results’, that bit should be optional…
I’m going to wrap this up by saying that I think a good facebook developer needs a good sense of humour, and an ability to make people laugh (at whatever level - sometimes base) or to catch their eye…
feel free to agree or disagree… Would love to get your (informed) opinion on this… maybe i’m missing the whole point of this particular blog (if that’s the case feel free to let me know)
26/05/08 Entrepreneur 27 Singapore » Blog Archive » Facebook Developer Garage II: The Finale
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