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Sydney Facebook Developer Garage
January 24th, 2008 · No Comments
Dave McClure on Facebook
Originally uploaded by bigmick
Last night I attended the first ever Sydney Garage for Facebook Developers. It was a reasonably good event, but a little too much seminar and not enough barcamp, although with some Barcamp Sydney vets in the crowd it nearly broke out into a Barcamp.
The crowd was mostly filled with developers who are either doing it or want to do it. A couple of business types and a new writer for ZDnet Australia who studied Aerospace.
There was a live cross to David Morin the Facebook Platform Manager, which was nearly ruined when someone (who may or may not have been from MySpace) tripped over a cord and knocked the projector over. He was asked lots of questions, most by Jodi Rich (previously of OneTel fame (or infamy)) about including more stuff to access via the API. His standard answer was;
“Thanks, we’ll take that feedback onboard”
So we thought he was a bot.
Then we saw a business guy who builds apps on Facebook talking stats which was pretty interesting. Lots about Facebook’s acquisition and follow on promotion being exponentially better than a normal web site (the guy was CEO of shop.com).
A couple of videos from Facebook guys….
Then we saw my buddy Dave McClure doing his Stanford talk about apps and engagement. Dave gets the blog pic spot coz of his great shirt, click to read it.
We then had a panel which was largely and thankfully dominated by
Dr Markus Weichselbaum from The Broth a proudly Australian Facebook Development house who has put out 26 apps and has millions of users. Marcus speaks with a lot of experience having tried, tested, measured, failed and succeeded over a short period.
Some of his key points that I got;
1. Don’t make it too complex. Keep it very simple.
2. Try, try, try again.
3. Don’t try to combine features into one app, break them up.
4. Know what you are trying to do (a) get lots of users quick or (b) get a small group of users with engagement.
5. Start monetizing straight away.
6. You’ll only really start making money once you pass one million page impressions and that’s only about $750, not enough to pay your server bill.
7. Your dev platform is irrelevant.
SilkCharm asked a good question about people getting bored with Facebook and I jumped in and dubbed it Facebook Fatigue. Too many invites, too many stupid apps and apps now pushing the point to try and make money, like SuperWall the SuperSpampingAdware app. Marcus came to the rescue here and reminded us that we are going through a period of experimentation which means lots of failing and some success. It will continue, the apps will get better, more engaging and better monetized.
I’d really like to have more of an open session next time, maybe we’ll have a big break out from Barcamp and see what comes of it? Or maybe Sydney is ready for some specialised camps? FBCamp, TwitterCamp, etc?
P.S. I’m also proposing a quick Beer 2.0 since Marcus is in town this Monday night over from Perth. Anyone up for it? Funkycoda??? From 5pm at the Shellbourne?
I agree the FB Dev Garage needed to be more BarCampy or even a CodeCampy where we did more techical bits. There was a general agreement between a few of the attendees I was talking to that they were expecting a more technical event than what was given. But personally, I think it was a good start, atleast for the first Dev.Garage, to get to know whats involved from the "business" side of things and a quick "chat"/"intro" by some of the people involved with Facebook on a deeper level.
It would be interesting to see if we can have a "Social Networking Code Camp" and maybe Facebook Developer Garage can be tended towards that market. There are a few people that do that now, but bringing them closer would be a good idea. There is the Jelly At Work, but that's on Friday's and something on a weekend would be good.
Should see if BarCampSydney3 can have a session for this.
