Last summer the Wireless Innovation Network of British Columbia (WinBC) hijacked the Mobile Monday event series collected what seems some sponsorship cheques from provincial and federal government organizations and that looks where the Mobile Monday Vancouver story kicked off with great expectations ends.

Let’s reclaim the event and start a new Mobile Monday Vancouver series open and free to all. Anyone interested? Send your comments or thoughts along to the Vancouver Ajax & Web 2.0 (3.0) Developer Forum/Mailing List. Thanks!

Welcome to the Open Web Edition of the “Best of the West Top Facebook Application Index” compiled to highlight the most popular social web services designed or developed in Canada’s West (including in and around the Greater Vancouver, Victoria, Kelowna, etcetera metros).

The index uses the Facebook data tracked by the Adonomics service and includes the Adonomics estimate of the Facebook application valuation in $$$.

Consider the list in “Beta” since we accept more and new apps getting listed. We have compiled the index using all apps from the last two Vancouver Facebook Developer Garage events. Interested in getting listed? Add a comment to this posting or better add yourself to the SocialCamp event wiki to showcase your Facebook service live at App Nite hosted at the Open Web Vancouver 2008 conference at Canada Place on Day 2 on April 15th.

(This is cross-posted from the Official (Open)Social(Web)Camp 2008 Blog.)

You’re invited to sign-up for a lightning talk (10-15 min.) or/and Facebook/social network app live demo and Q&A at the upcoming SocialCamp hosted at the Open Web Vancouver 2008 conference on the 2nd day after lunch. Add your proposal to our event wiki or as an alternative send it to the SocialCamp organizer (yours truly;-).

The current App Nite live demo and Q&A line-up includes:

These Are My Kids 2.0 w/ Michael Fergusson

We’ve got a lot of new things to show. These Are My Kids is now a multi-modal, virtual private social networking system for families (no, we don’t market it that way (-; ). It can connect people via Facebook, email, Kinzin.com, and the postal mail. Gramma can be a member of this social network without even owning a computer. Did I blow your mind?

Ski & Snowboard w/ Reza Hussein

Love skiing or snowboarding? This is the app for you. We’ll give an overview of our app, how we take advantage of social elements, and how we use a map-driven interface for you to find new ski resorts, and how user-generated content is helping make this the largest and most accurate database of ski resorts in the world.

Protagonize - A collaborative fiction writing community w/ Nick Bouton

Protagonize is a creative writing community dedicated to writing various forms of collaborative, interactive fiction. One author writes a story, and others post branches or chapters to it in different directions. The result is an organic, evolving story where everyone can participate.

Nick Bouton will discuss community building in niche markets, Facebook integration, and contrast Facebook’s walled garden approach with the development and nurturing of a stand-alone social network / community site.

And the current lightning talk line-up includes:

• Hosting Options, Tips and Tricks for Scaling OpenSocial and Facebook Apps w/ Mark Mayo, Joyent
• Developing Social Web Applications using Ruby on Rails w/ Gerald Bauer
• Social Graph Enabling Every Site: Ideas on the Flock People Bar w/ Boris Mann
• Data Portability and Existing Social Networks w/ Aaron Klemm

Find out more at the SocialCamp event wiki. Add Yours!

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

On April 14+15 the Open Web Vancouver 2008 conference will showcase open web technologies, communities and culture, and evangelize the Open Web to developers, designers, organizers and the community at large.

What’s the Open Web? We have invited Brian Shire (Facebook’s PHP Internals Tech Lead) - who will talk about ‘Inside Alternative PHP Cache (APC) - Serving Millions of Facebookers’ at the Open Web Vancouver 2008 conference - for some insight.

Q: What’s the Open Web?

Brian Shire: The term “Open Web” represents the technology, people, organizations, and corporations that go beyond simple producer and consumer economics. This community revolves around the idea that many technologies can better grow and serve people if the source or accessibility is made available to everyone. This includes a number of open source technologies such as PHP, Apache, and MySQL (to name but a few), but as we witness more web based technologies emerge this extends into open standards, developer API’s, and greater user involvement.

Q: Why does the Open Web (Open Source, PHP, etc.) matter?

Brian Shire: The Open Web is important not only because it serves as the core for many web technologies, but because it’s part of technological growth. Important technology is often ubiquitous technology, and I believe we see this with products of the Open Web. From Apache and PHP stacks, to web standards, to the availability of things like 3rd-party Facebook apps we see the common trend of standardization and openness in order to take leaps in new technology. This often comes with the responsibility of mitigating risks like security, privacy, and a mutual respect of all the interests involved in the community.

Q: Tell us more about the Open Web and your ‘Inside Alternative PHP Cache (APC) - Serving Millions of Facebookers’ talk at Open Web Vancouver 2008.

Brian Shire: I’m excited to get an opportunity to speak at Open Web Vancouver 2008 about our work with existing open technologies, specifically Alternative PHP Cache (APC) and PHP. I’ll discuss how APC and PHP work together and some of the details that may not be apparent at first glance when scaling with APC. I’ll also go into some Facebook specific details and changes that we’ve contributed and some of our current work to handle growing performance requirements. APC serves as a good example of core technology being leveraged an maintained jointly by Facebook and the community. Facebook has been very supportive of contributing to existing technologies, releasing internal technologies for broader use, and making new tools available to application developers. We maintain a mirror of several projects as well as a our internally developed tools in the hopes of further spurring growth. Because of the existence of these tools and the ability to work directly with others on them, Facebook has been able to make advances in our developer API which has created a whole community of application developers and users. This is something that everyone gains from and is part of what an Open Web is about.

Thanks Brian Shire for your time and insight. Join us for Vancouver’s 1st Open Web Conference at Canada Place or/and tell us “What’s the Open Web and Why It Matters” and win a free two-day Open Web Vancouver 2008 conference pass.

About Brian Shire:

Brian Shire is Facebook’s technical lead for PHP internals and a developer for the Alternative PHP Cache (APC). Facebook is an amazingly popular social network of which Brian has been a part of for over the last two years focusing on performance and scalability. Other interests include embedded software, learning Japanese, and sailing.

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 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!

The Planet VanSoc (planet.vansoc.com) publishes social network new stories from Facebook and MySpace to LinkedIn and beyond from in and around Vancouver from Canada’s Pacific West Coast for easy reading or subscription in a single “river of news”. Latest stories include:

• Social Graph Applications: Why not for every community website? by Boris Mann
• Twemes.com - Twitter Memes by Geoffrey Meredith
• DataPortability.org is right to keep the problems small and solvable by David Gratton
• Kinzin’s These Are My Kids Adds Flickr Into The Mix! by Megan Cole

Interested in getting your blog included? Send a blurb about your blog highlighting some social network stories to the Vancouver Ajax & Web 2.0 (3.0) Forum/Mailing List. Thanks!

On April 14+15 the Open Web Vancouver 2008 conference will showcase open web technologies, communities and culture, and evangelize the Open Web to developers, designers, organizers and the community at large.

What’s the Open Web? We have invited Brad Neuberg (Google) - who will talk about ‘Google Gears: Teaching the Open Web New Tricks’ at the Open Web Vancouver 2008 conference - for some insight.

Gears is an open source plug-in that teaches current web browsers new tricks. Gears is a clever way to raise the bar cross-browser and cross-platform, today, running inside of Firefox and Internet Explorer on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. No more waiting years for features to show up across all browsers and platforms.

APIs include: A real embedded relational database (SQLite) for web sites! Client-side full text search! Threads for JavaScript! Offline! Secure and fast cross-domain mashups! Desktop Shortcuts! Better web APIs for mobile devices! and more!

Q: What’s the Open Web?

Brad Neuberg: The Open Web is not a laundry list of technologies, but rather a set of philosophies. These philosophies include:

• Decentralization - Rather than controlled by one entity or centralized, the web is decentralized — anyone can create a web site or web service. Browsers can work with millions of entities, rather than tying into one location. It’s not the Google or Microsoft Web, but rather simply the web, an open system that anyone can plug into and create information at the end-points.
• Transparency - An Open Web should have transparency at all levels. This includes being able to view the source of web pages; having human-readable network identifiers, such as URLs; and having clear network entry points, such as HTTP and REST exposes.
• Code Hackable - It should be easy to lash together and script the different portions of this web. MySpace, for example, allows users to embed components from all over the web; Google’s AdSense, another example, allows ads to be integrated onto arbitrary web pages. What would you like to hack together, using the web as a base?
• Open - Whether the protocols used are de-facto or de-jure, they should either be documented with open specifications or open code. Any entity should be able to implement these standards or use this code to hook into the system, without penalty of patents, copyright of standards, etc.
• From Gift Economies to Free Markets - The Open Web should support extreme gift economies, such as open source and Wikis, all the way to traditional free market entities, such as Amazon.com and Google. I call this Freedom of Social Forms; the tent is big enough to support many forms of social and economic organization, including ones we haven’t imagined yet.
• Third-Party Integration - At all layers of the system third-parties should be able to hook into the system, whether creating web browsers, web servers, web services, etc.
• Third-Party Innovation - Parties should be able to innovate and create without asking the powers-that-be for permission.
• Civil Society and Discourse - An open web promotes both many-to-many and one-to-many communication, allowing for millions of conversations by millions of people, across a range of conversation modalities.
• Two-Way Communication - An Open Web should allow anyone to assume three different roles: Readers, Writers, and Code Hackers. Readers create content, Writers create content, and Code Hackers create new network services that empower the first two roles.
• End-User Usability and Integration - One of the original insights of the web was to bind all of this together with an easy to use web browser that was integrated for ease of use, despite the highly decentralized nature of the web. The Open Web should continue to empower the mainstream rather than the tech elite with easy to use next generation browsers that appear highly usable and integrated despite having an open infrastructure. Open should not mean hard to use. Why can’t we have the design brilliance of Steve Jobs coupled with the geek openness of Steve Wozniak? Making them an either/or is a false dichotomy.

Notice something very important; at no time above did I bind the Open Web to a particular set of technologies. Today the above philosophy is instantiated using a particular set of technologies, including URLs, HTTP, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, etc. However, if we define the Open Web in terms of these technologies, then we risk losing sight of what makes the web special and being able to have the intellectual nimbleness to evolve the infrastructure of the web. For example, we can and should evolve better layout languages than CSS, better document formats than HTML, etc., especially if we want the web to survive as a long-term social institution and public good, similar to the electricity grid, public-water systems, etc. We will be fighting yesterdays battle while allowing new, proprietary technologies to take over if we focus on technologies rather than philosophy. If we take the long term view, how can we give the web an open enough infrastructure to evolve over time and meet each generations needs, while maintaining its structure enough to actually mean something and stay true to its promise, similar to the U.S. Constitution?

Q: Why does the Open Web matter?

Brad Neuberg: The Open Web is like something from an Arthur C. Clarke science fiction story: its a globe spanning, hypertext network containing billions of documents, conversations, and applications, used by a huge cross section of society. Who would have thought it ever would have been successful or stayed as open as it has? It’s not controlled by any one government or company. Our historical closeness to the web creates a kind of myopia, where we can’t see how amazing it is. It’s a billion Library of Alexandrias dropped into our laps.

Douglas Engelbart, father of much of what we have in the computer industry, including the mouse, hypertext, and groupware, thought that computers would become as fundamental to humanity as the development of writing and language have been. Language is probably only about forty-thousand years old, while writing is only about eight-thousand years old. If you pull back and take the larger view, the web and computers are part of a grand development playing out over decades around new tools for communication. Writing and language have fundamentally changed our sense of self, with positive and negative ramifications; computers and the web hold the same promise, though it will take decades for this to play out.

If the web and computers hold this promise, its important to keep the resulting system as open and accessible as possible. Do we want a system that devolves into something like Ancient Egypt, with an authoritarian force controlling and centralizing the water supply? This lead to the longest known authoritarian civilization in history, lasting for thousands of un-broken years. For example, what if the pencil and paper had never escaped the grasp of the Church? If we can keep the open web nimble and open, it can set the stage to fuel further innovations and inventions, just as writing and language gave rise to books, social polities, etc.

Q: Tell us more about the Open Web and your ‘Google Gears: Teaching the Open Web New Tricks’ talk at Open Web Vancouver 2008.

Brad Neuberg: Okay, if we agree that the Open Web is important, how do we create a way to update the web and keep it relevant? The U.S. Constitution, for example, includes special provisions to evolve itself and stay relevant. Even with its warts, the U.S. is now the world’s oldest and continuous republic.

The web’s existing update mechanisms just don’t work. It takes years for new features to go from proposal to show up across enough browsers to be used consistently; this is a recipe for fail if we want the web to exist as a long-term entity, rather than a one-hit wonder.

I joined Google to help with a project known as Gears. Gears is an open source plug-in that teaches current web browsers new tricks. Gears is a clever way to raise the bar cross-browser and cross-platform, today, running inside of Firefox and Internet Explorer on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. No more waiting years for features to show up across all browsers and platforms.

I want to look back five years from now and say that I worked with the community to build an open source update mechanism for the web. Why can’t we rev the base infrastructure of the web much quicker, plus create more robust, open extension points along the entire web stack, ala Greasemonkey? Is Gears the answer to this? I’m not sure, but its the best answer we have today. Gears is a great way to get the conversation started, plus get HTML 5 out to today’s browsers.

On a more prosaic level, Gears gets the following features into today’s browsers without waiting years, ready to use by web devs right now:

• A real embedded relational database (SQLite) for web sites
• Client-side full text search
• Thread-like execution for JavaScript
• Offline web applications
• Secure and fast cross-domain mashups
• Desktop shortcuts
• Better web APIs for mobile devices
• and more.

Intrigued? Come and learn more at the talk on Gears at Open Web Vancouver 2008.

Thanks Brad Neuberg for your time. Join us for Vancouver’s 1st Open Web Conference at Canada Place or/and tell us “What’s the Open Web and Why It Matters” and win a free two-day Open Web Vancouver 2008 conference pass.

About Brad Neuberg:

Brad Neuberg is an open source geek and developer advocate for Google. He currently work with the Gears team; created Dojo Offline and Dojo Storage, libraries that enable applications to go offline easily and store large amounts of data on the client-side; created the Really Simple History library, a well-known framework that makes it easy to bookmark and work with the browser history for Ajax applications; worked with Douglas Engelbart on the HyperScope project, grafting new hypertext abilities onto the contemporary web; and invented coworking, an international grassroots movement to found a new kind of workspace for independents. He also created the Paper Airplane project, an initiative to develop new kinds of web browsers that deeply support community and next-generation browsing. Brad also generally have a messy house, unwashed dishes in the sink, and cat hair all over his clothes from his cat, George and lives in San Francisco.

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

On April 14+15 the Open Web Vancouver 2008 conference will showcase open web technologies, communities and culture, and evangelize the Open Web to developers, designers, organizers and the community at large.

What’s the Open Web? We have invited Vancouverite Bruce Byfield - a writer for Linux.com and other publications - for some insight.

The Open Web is a vision of the Web’s future that supports open, cross-platform standards and free and open source software, and opposes vendor lock-in and proprietary standards and software.

Bruce Byfield: Technically, it’s a term used mainly by Mozilla to indicate a vision of the web based on the Mozilla Manifesto. Sometimes, Mozilla uses the term to indicate specific technologies that it would like to advance.

However, in the broadest sense, the Open Web is a vision of the Web’s future that supports open, cross-platform standards and free and open source software, and opposes vendor lock-in and proprietary standards and software. In this sense, the Open Web is an idea that anyone interested in free software can support.

You could say that the Open Web is a better articulated, more mature version of the vision that early Web pioneers had.

Q: Why does the Open Web (and Open Source) matter?

Bruce Byfield: Conscious support for the Open Web and for free software can rally support against efforts to control the web, either through proprietary software imposing a de facto standard (as Internet Explorer did before the rise of Mozilla), or through legislation, such as the efforts to end net neutrality. Both these threats could end the internet as we know it, and would tend to keep control of the greatest medium for personal communication ever invented in the hands of rich individuals and the most developed nations.

On a personal level, the matter is partly a matter of ensuring consumer choice. However, the real issue is one of personal freedom. The Open Web and free software are necessities if the basic right of freedom of expression is to continue to be meaningful in an increasingly computer-dominated society. Without them, the poor everywhere — but especially in developing nations — will be even more disenfranchised in the future than they are now.

And in a computerized society, such issues is not just a philosophical concern or a matter of personal dignity, although both are important. Rather, they can also have direct consequences in terms of people’s control of their lives and even their job prospects.

By supporting the Open Web and free software, you can help to close the gap between rich and poor and between industrialized and developing nations. In addition, by removing the profit motive, you can also help the struggle to preserve minority languages and increase computer access for people with disabilities.

Moreover, because you can do these things on older hardware with free software, support for these issues is also an environmentally-friendly choice.

These concerns need to be as well-known as recycling in the average person’s mind. Since they are obviously not, the promotion of the Open Web and free software should be a priority for concerned people everywhere.

Q: Tell us more about the Open Web and your ‘Working w/ the Free Software Media’ talk at Open Web Vancouver 2008.

Bruce Byfield: The Open Web and free software shouldn’t be advocated to most people in technical terms, or by discussing specific standards or pieces of code. Geeks, of course, are interested in such things, but most people aren’t.

Instead, you should talk to the average person about the ethical implications of these issues. Just as with recycling or environmentalism, people can understand the ethical importance of the issues when they don’t understand the technical ones.

Thanks Bruce Byfield for your time. Join us for Vancouver’s 1st Open Web Conference at Canada Place or/and tell us “What’s the Open Web and Why It Matters” and win a free two-day Open Web Vancouver 2008 conference pass.

About Bruce Byfield:

Bruce Byfield is a contributing editor for the SourceForge sites Linux.com and the IT Manager’s Journal. Among other topics, he reports on the Debian Project, the Free Software Foundation, licensing issues, and office applications. He also writes a monthly blog for the Linux Journal website, which tends to center on varying aspects of OpenOffice.org, the free software office suite. In addition to his online publications, he has published in such magazines as Linux Journal, Maximum Linux, and The New Internationalist.

Before becoming a journalist, Byfield was marketing and communications director at Progeny Linux Systems, and product manager at Stormix Technologies. His book Witches of the Mind is considered the definitive work on the American fantasist Fritz Leiber. He also designs elearning courses and is a marketing and communications consultant.

Byfield lives in Burnaby, Canada. In addition to free and open source software, his interests include parrots, running, science fiction, and listening to punk-folk music.

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

On April 14+15 the Open Web Vancouver 2008 conference will showcase open web technologies, communities and culture, and evangelize the Open Web to developers, designers, organizers and the community at large.

What’s the Open Web? Good question. Tell us “What’s the Open Web and Why It Matters” and win a free two-day Open Web Vancouver 2008 conference pass.

How the contest works: Write a posting answering the two questions:

• What’s the Open Web?
• Why does the Open Web matter? Why is the Open Web important?

That’s it. Publish your posting on your site, blog or elsewhere and than tell us about it to get short-listed for the free two-day Open Web Vancouver 2008 conferece pass. Choices include:

• Add a comment with a link to your “What’s the Open Web?” posting to this posting.
• Add a comment with a link to your “What’s the Open Web?” posting to the Open Web Vancovuer 2008 Upcoming event listing.
• Add a wall posting with a link to your “What’s the Open Web?” posting to the Open Web Vancouver 2008 Facebook event page.
• Send a tweet (@openweb200 with a link to your “What’s the Open Web?” posting to the Open Web Vancouver 2008 Twitter.

Not interested in Open Web? As an alternative tell us “What’s Web 3.0 / Microformats / the Semantic Web / the Giant Global Graph and why it all matters”.

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!