Welcome back to the Facebook App Nite Q&A Series. Today let’s welcome Garth Shoemaker talking about “I’m Reading” on Facebook.
The fact is that there are many shady approaches out there for promoting your app. You are going to have to make a choice about whether you want to embrace these approaches or not. If you do, you are sacrificing some user satisfaction for pure growth. If you ignore them, then you can focus on providing real value to your users. Personally, I am worried that these approaches have already turned many users away from apps, but hope that in the future quality will come out on top.
Q: Can you tell us a little bit about your “I’m Reading” Facebook application?
Garth Shoemaker: “I’m Reading” was designed with the goal of helping users catalog books they own, as well as find new and exciting books they have never heard about. It was designed from the start to leverage social relationships. Users can see all the books their friends have read, and share reviews of their various books.
I started developing the app the day the new platform was announced. I chose books as a subject for the app because back in the 90s I made a book selling website which was fairly popular. At the time I was one of the first Amazon Associates, and made some decent money. I was intrigued by how I could leverage this experience, as well as the social aspects of Facebook, to make a really great books app.
The app has been quite popular so far, with almost 50,000 users. For some unknown reason, it has been particularly popular in Sweden and Norway, which account for over half its users. I have been focusing recently on functionality specifically for supporting those foreign users.
Q: What’s the Facebook advantage? How does it tap into Facebook’s social network and circle of friends? How do you keep Facebookers engaged?
Garth Shoemaker: Even though we are usually alone when we read, books are nevertheless a very social experience. Friends enjoy talking about books they’ve read, sharing book ideas, and forming book clubs. The Facebook advantage for “I’m Reading” centers around the use of pre-existing social networks in Facebook to support activities related to books. If I can make the app successfully support these common book-centered social interactions, then its users will find their lives to be a little bit more enjoyable, and the app will succeed.
Q: Inside your “I’m Reading” Facebook app: What languages, libraries and frameworks have you used to develop “I’m Reading”?
Garth Shoemaker: The app uses PHP and MySQL. These have both proven to be generally excellent technologies for app development, although MySQL has annoyed me a few times with some of it’s limitations. The biggest challenge I’ve faced so far is with my discount hosting company. It has a tendency to go offline, which of course gets my users all riled up.
Q: Any tips and tricks or advice you can share on developing, designing or marketing Facebook apps?
Garth Shoemaker: First, always think of your user. This should be obvious, but I have seen many apps that clearly don’t take into account how the everyday person thinks. When designing your app, imagine yourself to be a typical user attempting to accomplish a typical task. Map out your imaginary user’s thought process, and the related steps he would expect to have to complete to accomplish his goal. Your app’s design should be based on this thought process, not some developer’s perspective, which is often technology-centered or data-centered. Also realize that however you design your app, there is going to be something wrong with it, and it is going to require constant iterative improvement.
Second, the fact is that there are many shady approaches out there for promoting your app. You are going to have to make a choice about whether you want to embrace these approaches or not. If you do, you are sacrificing some user satisfaction for pure growth. If you ignore them, then you can focus on providing real value to your users. Personally, I am worried that these approaches have already turned many users away from apps, but hope that in the future quality will come out on top.
Thanks Garth Shoemaker for your time and insight.
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