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.

Join us for Vancouver’s 3rd Facebook Developer Garage and App Nite hosted at Open Web Vancouver 2008 at Canada Place on April, 15th and see more Facebook widgets live in action or sign-up for a live demo and Q&A.

Questions? Comments? Send them along to the Vancouver Ajax & Web 2.0 (3.0) Developer Forum/Mailing List. Thanks!

Welcome back to the Facebook App Nite Q&A Series. Today let’s welcome John Boxall from Handi Mobility talking about MyBus.

Q: Can you tell us a little bit about MyBus on Facebook?

John Boxall: MyBus for Facebook was originally developed to complement our TransLink text messaging system (also called MyBus!) With MyBus for Facebook we try to make transit information accessible to the widest audience possible. The majority of Vancouver transit riders are high school and university students - and they are all on Facebook. It seemed like a natural fit.

Q: What’s the Facebook advantage? How does MyBus tap into Facebook’s social network and circle of friends?

John Boxall: The current version of MyBus doesn’t leverage the social graph - instead it simply tries to present relevant information in a relevant place. Whenever I’m going somewhere, typically the last thing I do before I go is hop on Facebook to update my status. By putting MyBus on Facebook I could do two things at once - and if it turned out I was going to miss my bus, I could surf Facebook for a few more minutes before I had to go.

Q: Inside MyBus: What languages, libraries and frameworks have you used to develop MyBus?

John Boxall: MyBus uses PHP & MySQL coupled with Propel & Memcache.

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

John Boxall: Useful != Popular. When designing an application on Facebook you need to step back and ask yourself exactly how you will attract users. To be successful you may have to be devious. Many top apps restrict functionality until a member has invited a certain number of friends. This may seem counter intuitive but actually is could be necessary for your app to grow.

Thanks John Boxall for your time.

Join us for Vancouver’s 3rd Facebook Developer Garage and App Nite hosted at Open Web Vancouver 2008 at Canada Place on April, 15th and see more Facebook widgets live in action or sign-up for a live demo and Q&A.

Questions? Comments? Send them along to the Vancouver Ajax & Web 2.0 (3.0) Developer Forum/Mailing List. Thanks!

Welcome back to the Facebook Demo Q&A Series. Today let’s welcome Michael Fergusson and Paul Prescod talking about “These Are My Kids” - the 2nd and latest Facebook application from Kinzin following the “Are You Normal?” hit that celebrated 1,000,000 Facebookers served sometime last year.

Viewers never need to sign up for anything, but if they are already Facebook users, they can take advantage of Facebook’s existing infrastructure of invitations and notifications.

You need to have a lot of extra capacity available because the traffic can come in waves depending on how you are ranked in the application directory. The safest way to be ready for extra capacity is to use load balancing, memcached and carefully selected database indexes.

Q: Can you tell us a little bit about your new These Are My Kids application on Facebook?

Michael Fergusson: You’re tired of publishing the same photos in five different places to try and please everybody, and they don’t want to sign up, create accounts, or remember passwords to make things easier for you. You’ve come to the right place: These Are My Kids solves this problem perfectly. It’s the easiest way to privately share pictures and stories about your kids with close friends and family.

Primary benefits:

Easy for them: they never need to sign up for anything, or create an account - they don’t even need to belong to Facebook. Your invitation is all they need to see the pictures you’ve shared with them.

Simple for you: No more copying from place to place, email attachments, or tech support calls from Mom. Add your photos once to These Are My Kids, and they get delivered safely to all your loved ones, whether they use Facebook, email only, or even (coming soon!) don’t use a computer at all.

Beautiful and Fun: Don’t just dump your photos into a boring list. Create beautiful “books” and profile pages for your kids that are a joy to view (only you need to know how easy it was). Your loved ones and browse and comment to their heart’s content.

Private: You can be confident that only the people you’ve explicitly invited have access to your content.

Q: What’s the Facebook advantage? How does These Are My Kids tap into Facebook’s social network and circle of friends? How do you keep Facebookers engaged?

Michael Fergusson:

• We enhance Facebook with tools optimized for family-oriented, multi-generational social networking. We can do this without diminishing the value of Facebook as a “peer-oriented” social networking environment.
• The majority of content creators are already using Facebook. It doesn’t make sense to push them somewhere else. They can stay in Facebook and leverage the tools there.
• Viewers never need to sign up for anything, but if they are already Facebook users, they can take advantage of Facebook’s existing infrastructure of invitations and notifications.
• Virtually all Facebook users will have family with whom they wish to network but who haven’t yet joined a social network. We give them an easy on-ramp to get started with social networking, without needing to swallow the whole pill at once.
• More than just becoming viral among Facebook users, we’ll also become viral among parents and grandparents who are not current users of social networking systems. We’ll give them an easy onramp, and a clear reason to join (to create and share books of their own).

Q: Any tips or tricks you can share about developing a Facebook app using Ruby on Rails?

Paul Prescod: You need to have a lot of extra capacity available because the traffic can come in waves depending on how you are ranked in the application directory. The safest way to be ready for extra capacity is to use load balancing, memcached and carefully selected database indexes.

Q: Any lessons you have learned? Any new tips, tricks or advice you can share on developing, designing or marketing Kinzin’s 2nd Facebook app after the “Are You Normal?” hit?

Michael Fergusson: “Are You Normal?” isn’t designed to be a place you spend tons of time. It’s a place that entertains you for a while, and leaves you somewhere that’s interesting, so you can continue your journey (and hopefully come back soon). If your app is a cul-de-sac, it’s much more likely your users won’t come back.

Aesthetics matter. A lot.

Thanks Michael Fergusson and Paul Prescod for your time.

Join us for Vancouver’s 2nd Facebook Developer (& Designer) Garage and 1st in the new year for a live “These Are My Kids” demo and Q&A at the Vancouver Film School Theatre.

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.

Welcome to the Facebook Demo Q&A Series. Today let’s welcome back Jeremy Lim (Project Opus, Donat Group) updating us on what’s new in Mixx Maker, what lessons Team Mixx Maker has learned on Facebook, insight on sharing music online, and more.

Mixx Maker and MixxMaker.com are both running on the same Drupal install, so they share the same database. Because of that, they both share a mutual blog and forum. Plus, we can also aggregate all Mixxs for display on MixxMaker.com.

Not reinventing the wheel can be a good thing. Mixtapes worked, so Mixx Maker works. The concept of contextual music is tried and true, and people don’t have to relearn the idea – they just know. Personality pieces are also good. A Mixx’s theme and the music tied to it speaks volumes of a person, which does cater to the ego.

Q: What’s new in Mixx Maker? How does Mixx Maker differ from the 1st iteration/version?

Jeremy Lim: From a functional point of view, Mixx Maker is still very much the same from when you saw it last, but it has been polished up for public release. Some planned features, like using a photos as poster frames, were dropped in order for us to focus in on Mixx Maker’s core functionality – music sharing.

With this release, we’re also launching MixxMaker.com, a hub for Mixxs and Mixxers to come together. Right now, we’re offering collaboration through a forum, but in the future, we want to streamline multiple social networks together so users can create their own ‘music social maps’ through Mixx Maker.

The last time we presented, there were a lot of questions about legal and scalability issues. Since then, we have consulted legal opinion, and have been ensured that we stand on solid ground. We also showed Mixx Maker to members of the music industry, and received favorable feedback from Nettwerk Music Group and musicians. Both Nettwerk and the musicians saw Mixx Maker as a helpful tool to share and promote music. To address the scalability issues, Mixx Maker is now hosted on a new server provided by Peer1. (Many thanks to Delynn, Boris, and Lance for helping us with everything!)

Q: Can you share any lessons you have learned from Mixx Maker?

Jeremy Lim: Developing applications ALWAYS take longer than expected and asking for help can carry you a long way. From the start, our CEO, David Gratton, has always stressed that Mixx Maker be something that is simple and that offers instant value.

Also, not reinventing the wheel can be a good thing. Mixtapes worked, so Mixx Maker works. The concept of contextual music is tried and true, and people don’t have to relearn the idea – they just know. Personality pieces are also good. A Mixx’s theme and the music tied to it speaks volumes of a person, which does cater to the ego.

Q: Can you tell us how the Mixx Maker (and/or Opus) website complements the Mixx Maker Facebook app?

Jeremy Lim: Mixx Maker and MixxMaker.com are both running on the same Drupal install, so they share the same database. Because of that, they both share a mutual blog and forum. Plus, we can also aggregate all Mixxs for display on MixxMaker.com.

Right now, Mixx Maker doesn’t tie back to ProjectOpus.com. However, integration is definitely in the future plans.

Q: Any tips or tricks you can share about developing a Facebook app using Drupal?

Jeremy Lim: Developers should watch how they’re handling URLs. You have to constantly jump back and forth between your server and Facebook’s. Also, forms should send their data through Facebook instead of directly to your server.

The Drupal-Facebook integration code is very small. Once we had that in place, it was a lot of straight Drupal for most of the pages, and we were able to add features rather quickly.

When it comes to design, overwriting some of the main form theming functions can let you create a consistent ‘Facebook’ feel for all our forms.

Q: Any comments on the challenges of building a social web application that lets you share music?

Jeremy Lim: Legal issues on stealing and broadcasting music were always a big concern. We had to put a number of checks in place to make sure the song files uploaded stayed within fair use.

Even with legal and industry support, we’re sure some people will remain uncertain of Mixx Maker, especially fear that the RIAA breeds. Fortunately for us, the music industry is finally shifting towards new digital marketing and distribution. Today, three of the four major music labels have already dropped DRM, with Sony soon to be the last. Times are changing, and we’re confident things will shift in our favour in the long run.

For more information on our checks, see our Mixx Maker blog story titled “How Mixx Stays Within Fair Use”.

Thanks Jeremy Lim for your time.

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, My Bus, Class Talk, Mixx Maker and Eat-a-Rama and send in your nomination!

Welcome back to the Facebook Demo Q&A Series. Today let’s welcome Sebastian Troen talking about Eat-A-Rama - the latest Facebook application from the Social Networking Team at ActiveState following up on Up4 - ActiveState’s 1st entry into the social networking world.

Join us for Vancouver’s 2nd Facebook Developer (& Designer) Garage and 1st in the new year and see Eat-A-Rama and other Best of the West Facebook Awards Nominees live in action at the Vancouver Film School Theatre.

Identify the potential revenue sources for a project up front. With Up4 the idea was rather general and so we wanted something that was more focused on a specific area and had clearer revenue options. There’s a huge industry around dining that gives us plenty of options with Eat-A-Rama over and above advertising.

Q: Can you tell us a little bit about your Eat-A-Rama Facebook application?

Sebastian Troen: Eat-A-Rama helps you to discover new restaurants and share your favourite restaurants with your friends. Our social circle contains more relevant information about what’s good and what’s not, where’s the newest hot spot and the best hole in the wall that no one knows about. Coming from Vancouver where going out to eat is such a huge part of our lifestyle we constantly found ourselves trying to figure out new places to eat and remembering places that had been recommended to us. Thus came the idea for Eat-A-Rama.

Q: What’s the Facebook advantage? How does Eat-A-Rama tap into Facebook’s social network and circle of friends? How do you keep Facebookers engaged?

Sebastian Troen: Talking about food and restaurants is naturally a social topic. People love to discuss, debate and share favourite places and not-so-favourite places. In some places discussing the ranking and relative value of restaurants is almost a religion, such as when talking about barbecue places in Kansas City or sushi places in Vancouver. Food is such a subjective thing and we all have opinions on it that we want to share with our friends that it’s a great fit with Facebook where the sharing of ideas and recommendations is so popular. Eat-A-Rama lets people build favourites lists, identify places they want to go or recommend restaurants to their friends. Sometimes the results of a person’s ratings and comments can surprise even themselves.

Q: Inside Eat-A-Rama: What languages (PHP, Java, Ruby, etcetera), libraries and frameworks have you used to develop Eat-A-Rama?

Sebastian Troen: The actual app uses Python, Django and MySQL while the admin app uses Ruby on Rails and MySQL.

Q: Any new tips and tricks or advice you can share on developing, designing or marketing ActiveState’s 2nd Facebook app after Up4?

Sebastian Troen: There’s a couple of tips we can share. First is the issue of scope, it’s really important to get a good handle on the size and scope of the project. We were aiming to have Eat-A-Rama live before Christmas but unfortunately the project was so big that we’re still finishing it off here in January. Which is fine as we’re working on some kickass features, but it’s important to plan for it. Secondly, identify the potential revenue sources for a project up front. With Up4 the idea was rather general and so we wanted something that was more focused on a specific area and had clearer revenue options. There’s a huge industry around dining that gives us plenty of options with Eat-A-Rama over and above advertising.

Q: Any good restaurants in Vancouver you can recommend?

Sebastian Troen: The top restaurants in Vancouver right now according to the Eat-A-Rama community are: Chambar, Hapa Izakaya and Vij’s. Though it’s still early so we encourage everyone to install Eat-A-Rama and rate and review their favourite restaurants. Plus, for January, whenever you invite 5 friends who install Eat-A-Rama, we’re donating $1 to your local food bank.

Thanks Sebastian Troen for your time.

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, My Bus, Class Talk, Mixx Maker and Eat-a-Rama and send in your nomination!

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!

Welcome back to the Facebook Demo Q&A Series. Today let’s welcome Ahmad Wasfi talking about the Best of the West 2007 Nominee BC Event.

The Facebook Markup Language (FBML) also offers an elegant way of designing user interfaces. The usual concerns of browser compatibility and screen resolution can soon be part of the past.

Q: Can you tell us a little bit about your BC Event Facebook application?

Ahmad Wasfi: It is an easy and fun place to find, rate, sign-up, and share events in British Columbia. People could locate over 15,000 events occurring in BC. The application allows people to see the important events happening today, over the next seven days, or their favorite events through the custom feeds that they create.

Q: What’s the Facebook advantage? How is your BC Event app 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?

Ahmad Wasfi: Events are social experiences and Facebook provides the social context necessary. It represents a separation of concerns very nicely. I can focus on the business logic of the application such as mining the events from the web space of BC and Facebook provides the customer management with a huge base. You can compare between the original Lerna.ca web site and the Facebook one. BC Event enables Facebookers to see the big picture with the ability of zooming in. They can see all the important events happening and can see their favorite ones at the same time. They can share events and see who of their friends are attending them.

Q: Inside your BC Event Facebook app: What languages (PHP, Java, Ruby, etcetera), libraries and frameworks have you used to develop BC Event?

Ahmad Wasfi: I use Java, Servlets, EJBs and Facebook’s Java library.

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

Ahmad Wasfi: Facebook accelerates the development time. There are over 10,000 applications and many more are appearing every day. It provides a new paradigm of applications. It is a big step forward for software developers to concentrate on the business logic.

The Facebook Markup Language (FBML) also offers an elegant way of designing user interfaces. The usual concerns of browser compatibility and screen resolution can soon be part of the past.

Thanks Ahmad Wasfi.

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 and send in your nomination!

Welcome back to episode two in the Facebook Demo Q&A Series with Vancouverite Geoff Peters talking about the Best of the West 2007 Nominee Funny Jokes.

One question I still have about the Facebook platform is how to monetize my app. Contributing to the Facebook community is great, but at this stage I’d rather spend my limited recreational programming time on projects that give back the most bang for the buck.

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

Geoff Peters: One question I still have about the Facebook platform is how to monetize my app. Contributing to the Facebook community is great, but at this stage I’d rather spend my limited recreational programming time on projects that give back the most bang for the buck. I have been quite successful with monetizing websites outside of Facebook, but I’ve yet to see how this can be done with a Facebook app.

What I would suggest is: Keep it simple! Do the minimum possible to make an interesting app, and then analyze the data on how users are actually using it, and then you can improve the app iteratively and add new features. Talk about your ideas with everyone and _listen_ to what they have to say. I’ve had one of the most innovative ideas I’ve encountered suggested by a patent lawyer, of all people (but that’s another story!).

Q: Any future plans for Funny Jokes or other Facebook apps?

Geoff Peters: As soon as I can figure out how to make at least a little bit of money through my app, I’ll be sure to add new features. For now I’m happy to have got my feet wet and learned about Facebook’s big experiment.

Thanks Geoff Peters.

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 and send in your nomination!

Welcome back to the Facebook Demo Q&A Series. Today let’s welcome Vancouverite Geoff Peters talking about the Best of the West 2007 Nominee Funny Jokes.

It’s fascinating how Facebook profiles are a new kind of “online identity” that is becoming totally mainstream. The way a profile is filled out represents how a person wants to look to others (at least on Facebook), much like how people choose what clothes they wear and their overall image in the real world.

Q: Can you tell us a little bit about your Funny Jokes Facebook app?

Geoff Peters: The Funny Jokes facebook app is an extension of one of my web sites into Facebook. About six months ago I created a web site outside of Facebook called “Make Google Laugh” - it invites users to type a joke and it will calculate how “funny” it is according to Google. And yes, it really works; at least, it’s better than random, and it does use some interesting calculations which are unfortunately secret.

Anyways, the big benefit of Make Google Laugh is that I have had about 85,000 jokes entered by users in the last six months, and I have taken it upon myself to read as many of these jokes as possible and identify the actual funny ones. I need to do some manual approving/rejecting of jokes, because although my Google humor detection algorithm works somewhat, it still can’t detect distasteful jokes. (As an aside, that would be a whole ‘nother site: “make Google frown”).

Anyways, it turns out that about 10 - 20% of the jokes in my database are actually funny and family friendly, and that still is a lot of jokes. So basically I created a very simple Facebook app that grabs a random joke from my “approved jokes” list, and displays it on the user’s profile. There is a button that will replace the current joke with another random joke. The user can click the button until they find a joke that they like, and that joke will be displayed on their profile for all to see.

Q: Any favorite jokes?

Geoff Peters: I’ve had the opportunity to read a lot of jokes. Reading the incoming jokes is like taking the “humor pulse” of the Internet. I start noticing trends like a whole bunch of people entering the same joke around the same time. I think my all time favorite is: “Why did the scarecrow win a Nobel prize? Oh, he was outstanding in his field.” But there are tons of jokes about Chuck Norris, “your momma”, Michael Jackson, various people and animals walking into bars (and either saying ouch or talking to the bartender), and of course lots of Knock-knock jokes and variants on the chicken crossing the road.

Q: What’s the Facebook advantage? How is your Funny Jokes app different from a plain old web application/widget? How does it tap into the social network? How do you keep Facebookers engaged?

Geoff Peters: It’s fascinating how Facebook profiles are a new kind of “online identity” that is becoming totally mainstream. The way a profile is filled out represents how a person wants to look to others (at least on Facebook), much like how people choose what clothes they wear and their overall image in the real world. Having the ability to display “funny jokes” on one’s profile, and the ability to select which joke is currently displayed, is a way for a facebook user to add a humorous touch to their profile, much like a feather in one’s cap.

I must admit, I think this application has a lot of potential to grow and take advantage of the social networking features. Popular jokes could be published to the mini feeds, and there could be a joke rating feature. It could also develop into a Joke recommendation service, possibly by recommending jokes to you that your friends like.

Q: Inside Funny Jokes: What languages (PHP, Java, Ruby, etcetera), libraries and frameworks have you used to develop Funny Jokes?

Geoff Peters: It’s using PHP and MySql. I’m quite a proponent of PHP - I have given several presentations to the Vancouver PHP Association and spoke at one of their conferences a few years back (I even shook hands with Rasmus Lerdorf - it was quite a treat!). I also gave a workshop to the SFU Women in Computing Science on how to start learning PHP. For the Make Google Laugh part I am using Google’s (unfortunately deprecated) SOAP Search API which is still operational to those lucky few who signed up while it was working.

Thanks Geoff Peters. Check back tomorrow for the second part in the Q&A disussing the challenge to turn your Facebook application into a money spinner, the future of Funny Jokes and more.

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