Q: Can you tell us a little bit about your Facebook app Scratch and Win?
Russell Ovans: We wrote Scratch and Win, the first scratch-off lottery ticket game for Facebook. The tickets are animated and look just like real scratch-offs, but you buy and scratch them (or send them to your friends as a gift) all within Facebook. Users receive 10 free tickets a day initially, and as they achieve certain levels by playing the game, this number increases. Winning tickets credit the user’s account with tokens that are redeemed for collectible images. A favourite prize can be chosen to display on the user’s profile page.
We feel that Scratch and Win embodies three of the rules for a successful Facebook application:
- It involves collecting: winning tickets are redeemed for prize icons that are in sets. As you complete a prize set, you gain a level, which gives you more credits to buy tickets.
- It involves competition: there is a Rankings page to compare your winnings with your friends.
- It is an entertaining diversion.
We shipped the app on September 19th. Currently there are over 2600 users, and 825 daily active users.
Q: What’s the Facebook advantage? How is your Facebook app different from a plain old web application/widget? How does it tap into the social network?
Russell Ovans: The advantage for us as a small software company is how quickly our app has reached a sizable install base. We feel that we’ve just begun to properly exploit the social network advantage that Facebook offers. Currently, the app uses the social network in two ways:
- users can send tickets to friends as a gift; and,
- users can compare their success and titles with their friends on a Rankings page.
Q: Inside Scratch and Win: What languages (PHP, Java, Ruby, etcterea), libraries and framworks have you used to develop your Facebook app?
Russell Ovans: We wrote Scratch and Win in Java/JSP and utilized Spring and CSS in building the pages. The tickets are implemented in Flash. We host the application ourselves on a load balanced cluster of servers running Apache/Tomcat on Linux. The database is MySQL.
Q: Any tips and tricks or advice you can share on developing, designing or marketing Facebook apps?
Russell Ovans: We are primarily a contract software engineering company, and we built this app in order to learn the Facebook Platform as we had started to receive interest from our clients on doing something with Facebook. What we have personally found interesting is the process of monetizing the application through advertising, and on how to increase the install base through the viral aspects of Facebook.
For advertising, we started with our own ads, then added cubics, appsaholic, and google adsense. With about 15,000 page impressions per day we are generating enough revenue to buy the CEO a soy latte from Starbucks. A venti soy latte.
The number of installs/day really started to gain some traction once we put notifications on the user’s mini-feed whenever they sent a ticket to a friend. The key piece of advice we’ve picked up regarding the viral aspect of Facebook is that you should post a notification to the news feed whenever “someone does something to someone” or “someone achieved something” using your app. If your app doesn’t allow you to do something to someone, then chances are it’s not a good model for the social network.
Thanks Russell Ovans (Backstage Technologies) for your time. Interested in more? Join us at Vancouver’s first Facebook Developer Garage.
