Facebook “Are You Normal?” Demo Q & A with Megan Cole and Paul Prescod (Kinzin)

Q: Can you tell us a little bit about your Facebook App “Are You Normal?”?

Megan Cole: Are You Normal? is an application that was created in the just for fun category. It’s a place online that is a conversation starter that’s fun for the user to participate in. It encompasses the company philosophy and mandate, which is to build private spaces online for families and close friends to connect and share. Yes, Facebook is not a “private” place, but the content generated from this application is only seen BY your friends on Facebook.

Q: What’s the acceptance on Facebook?

Paul Prescod: 35,000 users in a couple of weeks since launch, over 90,000 in 3 weeks.

The app has been on the “most active” app front page several times in several different spurts over the last 3 weeks, at number 2 position on a day at the week 2 mark.

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? How does it get better with more Facebookers? How do you keep your users engaged?

Megan Cole: This app is social in that it allows friends to see and respond to friends’ answers - it generates and sparks conversations, provokes friends to respond, encourages participation. And what a better issue to healthily debate than people’s normalcy? The conversations and comments are endless.

Paul Prescod: Are You Normal gets better when more of your friends are engaged because it facilitates a conversation about what normalness is. It’s a trojan horse: it starts as a quick, easy survey and evolves into a discussion.

We provide a new list of discussion topics (in the form of survey questions) every week.

Q: Inside “Are You Normal?”: What languages (PHP, Java, Ruby, etc), libraries and frameworks have you used to develop “Are You Normal?”

Paul Prescod: We have used Ruby, Rails and RFacebook.

Q: Any tips and tricks or advice you can share on developing, designing or marketing Facebook apps?

Paul Prescod: Strengths and weaknesses of Facebook iframe apps: We could do 20-30 minutes talk on that alone actually. In summary:

Weaknesses:

• some security issues
• very susceptible to browser cookie configuration stuff
• generally a lot of effort to get cookies right
• UI constrainted by IFrame region
• less typical and therefore less tested
• Facebook is pushing people away from it

Strengths:

• more control over error reporting
• Full access to Javascript, CSS, etc. — no limits
• Easier to get running quickly without learning Facebook idiosyncrasies
• No 12-second timeout
• Easier to port pre-existing code

Thanks Megan Cole and Paul Prescod for your time. Interested in more? Join us at Vancouver’s first Facebook Developer Garage.