Facebook Developer Garage, 5th March - "Growing Up"

Last night I went along to the London Facebook Developer Garage, hosted by Sun Microsystems. I help to organise these through the garage committee. Last night was about "apps Growing Up, how we use them in business, how applications compete against each other and how they're coping with the real world of copyright".

The event was pretty packed, as normal, and amazing almost everyone managed to turn up at exactly the same time, so there was a huge queue to register. After everyone had arrived we cracked open the beers, and the pizzas (loads and loads of them) were delivered from Dominos).

Once we'd all had our fill we settled down. Had a quick introduction from Toby Beresford, who is the primary organiser of the garages here. He played us the "Facebook Anthem", a UK made song about being bored of Facebook and annoyed especially with applications. We then had to turn to the person next to us to ask what they thought about the future of applications (this discussion was continued into the pub after). 

Alexey Gabsatarov took a look at some of the top applications, stating that 90% of the top 200 apps have no utility or rational appeal, and appeal to our emotional make up, or as he described it: "apps a caveman would like". He suggested that our basic emotions are hardwired and have remained the same since caveman times, and so groups applications in this fashion:

The Self (personality tests etc)

The Family (kissing/hugging/personal relationships)

The Tribe (Friend lists, top friends etc)

The Chief (Compare/Compete with friends)

It was an interesting talk, although it does mainly apply to the 'emotional' applications with little rational utility, which I believe will decrease in predominance as more engaging and useful applications grow, boosted by the crack down on spammy applications which have fueled the growth of many of these simple apps. 

Next up, Andy McLoughlin from Huddle.net and Tom Woolway from Techlightenment took the stage to discuss the Huddle Workspaces application, which allows you to have secure spaces to store files and work notes, whether for personal or work. Huddle have a 'freemium' business model, allowing full functionality to free users, with additional storage for payment, and large scale serviced enterprise clients. They admitted that they designed the application mainly as a marketing tool to get users to sign up to the main service, and so didn't include complete functionality, although stressed that users within Facebook still had more than enough functionality to make use of the application without ever leaving, and the PHP facebook application works off the primary (ASP.NET) application using a mixture of APIs with SOAP, so that Facebook users could work alongside users from the main website, and could interchange between using Facebook and the main site with the same account (although to use the main site with the extra features you have to register, with your email address). 

I asked why they couldn't of given full functionality within the application, and why they thought that users were more valuable on their main site. They responded honestly that they wanted users email addresses to be able to try and upsell, rather than doing that through the application itself which may put off users. This is valid, although it is possible to send emails directly to users of apps through Facebook. It would also of been possible to ask users to register with their email inside the app to get access to more functions. What do you think?

David Parfect, from the new Facebook London office, came up to show us the polling system on Facebook. Relevant to our initial discussion, he asked "Apps on Facebook are useful for...", and bought 500 responses at $1 each, which is the fastest way (the votes started coming in real time). I jotted down the responses, but don't have the screen shots, so the wording of the answers may be slightly inaccurate:

1. Interacting with friends: 9%

2. Showing your emotions: 2%

3. Making your day go quicker: 15%

4. Irritating friends: 20%

5. Nothing: 54%

The responders were roughly split between male/female, with most from the 18-24 age range. Hmm... not a great response for application developers! Nevertheless, I believe this reflects the general fatigue of all the crappy, spammy apps that have pervaded Facebook for too long, and which I believe will die out over the course of the next six months, to be replaced by engaging, relevant applications. 

We had a great talk on copyright issues, with a particular look at Scrabulous, from Vanessa Barnett, BLP Law. This was really fun, and had a long digression into the legality of showing photos of Banksy work (it's still artwork, and thus copyright, even though many of it is also illegal graffiti). 

Matt Clayton, from Wakari, gave another excellent talk. He was hired by Sony to build an application to promote the new Rambo movie here in the UK, however at the same time another company was briefed to do almost exactly the same application to promote it in the US (duh). The US version was called Get Rambo, the UK one Become Rambo. In summary, Get Rambo tanked, whilst Become Rambo did amazingly well. Why? Well, that made up most of the talk!

There were a couple of key reasons. First, here in the UK they'd been promoting a Rambo facebook page, and by the time the app launched they had a few thousand fans who all installed the app and provided the first boost. This meant that when they started advertising the app (ad spend unknown) people saw activity and usage, a big difference. Also, instead of a simple attacking option which Get Rambo used, Become Rambo included a 'gameplay' element, with points and rankings, and different weapons which unlocked as you got more ranking points, as well as options to defend or retaliate. When you got to 100 points you 'became Rambo', and they had a secret status at 300 points. Matt said that there were users with over 2000 points still battling it out. Over 5 weeks, the length of the campaign, they got over 50,000 users with 6-7k daily active users.

They worked really hard on the page flow to keep users coming back, and added loads of viral functionality, with a really high conversion rate. The application itself is beatifully designed, combining the Rambo style with Facebook design features. Matt also talked about the huge importance of constant testing, saying that tiny tweaks made huge differences to invites and conversion levels. 

After the event, I went to the pub round the corner with Toby, Matt and Mike Butcher from TechcrunchUK. Around a few drinks we had some great discussions on the future of applications. Anyone following my tweets through the event would of heard that during his talk, Matt said that being reported in Techcrunch had no effect on user levels and was a waste of time for application developers trying to get users - not realising Mike was standing in the door. Of course, Techcrunch is primarily a business publication, so it was unlikely to make a difference - and Mike and Matt were getting on just fine in the pub after, so no hard feelings!