Man, what a ride.
09.10.07Filed Under: Apps, Judge-O-Rama, Tag Team, blippr
Tuesday, Jonathan IM’d me and said “Hey, check this out, you should go to this.” Four days later, we found ourselves on a plane to San Jose and the Graphing Social Patterns conference. Jonathan and I talked ideas on the way, but one thing we agreed on: We needed a Facebook app, and we needed one fast. We’d been planning on doing a Judge-O-Rama app for a while, but one thing about the conference kicked the need into high gear: AppNite, and the opportunity to show off what we could do.
Saturday night, we worked on some JOR polish, some blippr design work, and while I was waiting on the MySQL server software to download to my laptop, I started perusing the Facebook API docs. The following morning, we attended pre-conference workshops - Jon’s covered business and marketing on Facebook apps; my workshops covered the anatomy of a Facebook app and the construction thereof.
I started hacking - somewhat apart from the direction provided by the speakers - and produced a quick little app called “FriendThumbs“. It shows your last 49-updated friends (why not 50? 49 is a square!) and when you hover over them, a bigger picture with their last status. Simple stuff, but surprisingly useful. Off of that, I started building a Judge-O-Rama app. It turned out really well. You can start a contest with as little as one click and pit all of your friends against each other in a battle royale. It notifies your friend network that they are in the contest, and invites them to come participate… and perhaps start their own contest. From the first line of code I’d ever written for Facebook to demo time was about 34 hours. It took a half dozen Red Bulls, a case of Pepsi, and a metric crapload of coffee (and coding feverishly through every seminar today), but come demo time, I had an app. I showed it off, and the judges liked it (appropriate for an app that relies on people being judgmental, huh?). We took a win for the AppNite! I couldn’t believe it - every waking moment since that first line of code had been spent coding; I barely took time to eat, but it paid off. This is what it’s all about. This is hacking at its finest, carving an app out of code and ideas, fueled by adrenaline and caffeine, and seeing it pay off big. I’m having a hard time even blogging - I can’t wait to get back to code.
The future excites me. Going into this conference, I was skeptical about Facebook as a business platform. Now I’m completely sold, and having written not just one, but two apps this weekend, I’m sold on the platform from a technical perspective, too. What I was basically able to do is just write alternate views and some interface code for what we already had in Judge-O-Rama. I was able to just write the app once and then just…plug it into Facebook, immediately launching the app from obscure curiosity to a product that can - and will - be used by millions of people. I can’t wait to do this with blippr and other projects to come. I don’t have to choose between blippr and Facebook. I don’t have to decide if I’m going to do a Facebook app or a new Tag Team app. I can do them both, multiple facets of the same idea, fully integrated, each feeding, growing, benefiting, and strengthening the other.
The speed and ease with which it’s possible to build quality Facebook apps is amazing, and I am really looking forward to leveraging it as a parallel publishing platform in the future. This is what the social web is about - not giving people who they want, but enabling them to get who they want, what they want, where and when they want it. Facebook is one such location, and we’re going to be able to do some amazing things with it.
See you all there. I can’t wait.
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October 15th, 2008 at 4:35 am