Facebook Developer Garage - Translations App, Last.FM and porting apps to Bebo.

I had a great time last night at the monthly Facebook Developers Garage in London. Sun Microsystems hosted the event, and donated about 40 pizzas and two fridges full of beer - very cool.

I arrived early, made use of the free wifi, and drew a pretty badge to show everyone that I was from an agency (red):

The other colours were blue for developer, green for corporate and black for the mysterious anonymous delegates.

It kicked off with an introduction from Toby Beresford, who is chief organiser for the garage, and a run down of the current top ten apps, and adonomics top 10 hottest apps. 

The first main speaker was Javier Olivian, who is charge of internationalisation at Facebook. He showed us the translations app, using it live on screen, which was very interesting. It allows users to help translate the site in a number of ways. The primary way is inside the app pages, where the app feeds up untranslated phrases, and users can suggest translations. Once there's been a translation for a phrase, users can submit alternatives and vote other translations up or down - the final translated phrase is then the one used in the site. 

It is also possible for users to translate whilst they're browsing the site, which Javier showed to us. Everything translatable in the site whilst he was browsing had coloured underlines which could be clicked on to translate that phrase.

To keep things simple, they've rolled out the translation app to beta users based in Spain, France and Germany, as they decided that these would be the simplest to start with (and would probably reach the largest number of worldwide users to start with). Javier said that they are planning to roll out to other languages, and eventually any language you want - even "Klingon", if you really want to. 

We discussed the difficulty of adapting the layout for other alphabets, for example Arabic, Chinese etc. Javier said that although they're still working on the best ways to do this, they are open to changing the interface if necessary. 

A big thing for us in the garage was the ability to use the translations app for user applications, and Javier confirmed that they are working on ways for developers to feed code into the translations app so that 3rd party apps can be translated by users. This could be pretty amazing for developers who don't have the resources to translate applications themselves, and could open up apps for a huge range of users at virtually no cost. It will definitely be worth keeping an eye on this space. 

We had a couple of talks from sponsors, and then Toby came back on to have a quick run through of what's new this month in Facebook, which looked at the changes to the news feed, extended profiles, friend lists etc, and some more technical changes in FBML. 

The next talk was by Claire Levy, the Head of Business Development at Last.fm, who talked about three new applications they've launched in Bebo. They discussed how they thought hard about how to ensure that these applications were optimised for the Bebo platform - not just in the markup language, which is identical to FBML (just substitute SNML for FBML in the code), but in the look and feel of the apps, and in their names - for example, 'mates' rather than 'friends'. 

The apps are designed to increase brand awareness of Last.fm and to drive new users of the main app. The three apps were (not official names): 1. What I'm listening to, 2. Compare Music Tastes and 3. Music I like (with the ability to listen to similar music, one of Last.fm's key USPs). They didn't give any user numbers, if I get hold of any (public) info on their success I'll post it here. 

We took a quick look at Facebook Mobile, and how to integrate it into apps - including how to get around mobile browsers which try to pretend to be normal browsers. The ability to interact with users via SMS (two way) from apps could be really promising, although at the moment users have to go through quite a lot of hassle to allow this and connect with their phone, so it's unlikely to have huge take-up. 

There was also some debate on the relevancy of mobile sites, as more and more phones are going online with full browsers and 3G. There was some disagreement, with one of the main arguments in favour of the mobile sites being the much lower download sizes - relevant for both browsing speed and the cost of data packages. I think that mobile sites will continue to be relevant for the next 2-3 years, however after that I expect that unlimited high speed data packages will be the usual for mobiles - I have an unlimited data package on my blackberry for £8 a month, think that's pretty cheap (I'm a heavy user so get good deals). I expect this price will decrease even more in the future as more users go in for data packages and more firms start to compete on price for the mainstream. 

The last speech was from the Ebay guys behind their app StyleSlam. They explained that they tried a few apps working on pure functionality, e.g. letting users display what they're selling, what they want to buy etc, but had really low take-up. So, they decided to change tack and just work more on branding, and came up with StyleSlam - a very cool app that allows users to create a very detailed avatar, and buy and sell items of clothing and accessories to dress their avatar. They then added the ability to vote friends outfits up and down, giving 'kudos' scores - which made their user numbers rocket. It's worth taking a look at the app, it's a really great design, developed in Ruby, and has a great profile box - and is growing user numbers fast.

They're working on new functionality, and are planning to link in items inside the app with real items on Ebay that users can buy - a great way to link up the virtual with the real, drive branding and monetisation.

Were you there? If you have any more thoughts/questions on the night, let me know. What kind of things would you like to see at future garages?