Welcome back to the Facebook Demo Q&A Series. Today let’s welcome Mike Hrycyk (Digital Kiosk Technologies) talking about the Best of the West 2007 Nominee Music Gifts.
Don’t get too complex. Facebookers need to be able to tell what it does right away so they can dive in and have fun in the shortest time possible.
Q: Can you tell us a little bit about your Music Gifts Facebook app?
Mike Hrycyk: Music Gifts is a music application in which you get to produce and manage your own mixes from our fully licensed catalogue of one million tracks. You can share these mixes with your friends or you can give gifts. When you give someone a gift of a track or a mix you’re giving them the rights to that song. When you’re happy with your mix or gifts, you can send it to burn and Media Mouth mails you a burned audio CD of your music.
Music Gifts was designed and developed in our Digital Kiosk Technologies offices on Granville Island.
Q: What’s the Facebook advantage? How is your Music Gifts app different from a plain old web application/widget? How does it tap into the social network? How do you keep Facebookers engaged?
Mike Hrycyk: The Facebook advantage of Music Gifts is two-fold:
The first, and perhaps most unique facet of it for us is the ability to give a gift to your friends within Facebook that is actually worth something. We all know how fun and distracting the giving of gifts in Facebook can be but mostly they’re just little images that are cute but aren’t really worth anything. With Music Gifts, when you give a gift you’re buying and giving the credit for songs to your friends. They can then use those credits to burn songs for free. In the future we’ll have download rights and play rights that are also associated with these gifts.
The secondary facet that allows us to leverage the Facebook advantage is your ability to make your mixes your own way of any songs in the catalogue and then share them with your friends so that they then have control of the mix to play, update, burn etc. this allows you to create theme mixes for special occasions, show them your favourite jogging playlist, or whatever and let them add, modify, change as they like and use it or maybe even send it back.
Q: Inside Music Gifts: What languages (PHP, Java, Ruby, etcetera), libraries and frameworks have you used to develop Music Gifts?
Mike Hrycyk: Music Gifts is developed in ASP .Net using a Hibernet layer for database access.
Q: Any tips and tricks or advice you can share on developing, designing or marketing Facebook apps?
Mike Hrycyk: Some of the things we learned while working on our app:
- Don’t get too hung up about quality of your product. That sounds alien and obscene but Facebookers are amazingly tolerant of bugs and issues in your product. Getting up there and building a user base is often more important.
- Don’t get too complex. Facebookers need to be able to tell what it does right away so they can dive in and have fun in the shortest time possible.
- It has to be fun. Facebookers aren’t in it for productivity or real results they want the time they’ve already chosen to waste in Facebook to be as amusing as possible.
- Make sure you leverage the social aspect of Facebook. By passing things back and forth between friends you get more page views per day and you help to spread your app.
- If you’re after ad revenue (which we’re not) you need to make sure you give them a reason to come back each and every day. Success is rated on Facebook on your active users, not how many people join.
Thanks Mike Hrycyk.
Are you on the “Best of the West 2007″ Facebook Awards Wall? Join Green Gifts, Hockey Pool, Are You Normal?, Scratch and Win, Up4, Music Gifts, Funny Jokes, My Food Fix, BC Event, I’m Reading, Zoykes!, Coffee Shop, MyBus and send in your nomination!
