Welcome back to the Facebook Demo Q&A Series. Today let’s welcome Jeremy Holland and Dean Halford from MOK Agency talking about The Snow Report.
To grow within a niche market of Facebook we knew we had to tap into the interactive elements of Facebook, setting up profiles, setting up and documenting trips, posting gear online that riders can review and most importantly providing riders something useful.
Q: Can you tell us a little bit about The Snow Report on Facebook?
Jeremy Holland: The Snow Report is all about developing a social riding community for skiers and snowboarders within Facebook. The application provides over 700 mountain and weather conditions for users to access and display on their profiles. Also riders can set up rider specific profiles, plan trips with friends, see where other users are skiing and snowboading, and share insight on the best hills and best gear.
With The Snow Report, skiers and snowboarders are one click away from setting up a trip to the mountain, seeing what resorts have the best conditions and finding where their friends are riding.
Q: What’s the Facebook advantage?
Jeremy Holland: The Facebook advantage allows us to identify with a user who already socially interacts with others online. Many Facebook users grab information from Facebook more than anywhere else to grab information about friends. There are over a 100 ski and snowboard groups to network within and people from these groups are always willing to contribute ideas to improve our service.
Q: How is The Snow Report on Facebook different from a plain old web application/widget? How does it tap into Facebook’s social network and circle of friends? How do you keep Facebookers engaged?
Jeremy Holland: The gamut of applications and widgets are so diverse, it is not how we differ from others, but how we attempt to develop and structure our own endeavors. When Dean and I set up MOK Agency to build The Snow Report, we believed in the importance of our application to document, produce, display and distribute live content and useful information.
To grow within a niche market of Facebook we knew we had to tap into the interactive elements of Facebook, setting up profiles, setting up and documenting trips, posting gear online that riders can review and most importantly providing riders something useful.
Q: Inside Snow Report: What languages (PHP, Java, Ruby, etcetera), libraries and frameworks have you used to develop The Snow Report?
Dean Halford: Our application was built using the Ruby on Rails framework. It is actually my first Rails project – I had wanted to dabble in Rails for some time now and thought that this side project would would be a great way to start out. I haven’t pulled out all of my hair, wiped out any databases, or crashed Facebook just yet, but I would certainly not recommend a facebook app as a first project with any framework. We are also using the mootools animation/effects library on the client side (in inline frames) and a little bit of python to help with the profile updates.
Q:: Any tips and tricks or advice you can share on developing, designing or marketing Facebook apps?
Jeremy Holland: I look at many of the applications out there and it reminds me of when every website had flash as an intro to their websites. The backlash to useless Facebook applications is going to happen eventually and it could effect all applications and developers. If you want to create something try and create value for the end user.
Dean Halford: Don’t try to do everything on your home machine. It has become slightly less useable now that it’s become both my dev server and host to all of my update processes.
Thanks Jeremy Holland and Dean Halford for your time.
Join us for Vancouver’s 2nd Facebook Developer (& Designer) Garage and 1st in the new year and see The Snow Report and other Best of the West Facebook Awards Nominees live in action at the Vancouver Film School Theatre.
