Facebook Developer Garage London - January 2009

The first Facebook Developer Garage London of the year was held this evening at Sun Microsystems in Monument, London. I only managed to stay for half of the garage but managed to catch Joshua March (iPlatform), Iskandar Najmuddin (Nudge London), John (CTO of Huddle) and Ivan Zoratti (MySQL).

Iskandar talked about the introduction of custom FBML tags and how he thought that Facebook had now opened FBML to the community. Custom FBML tags are essentially chunks of XHTML and JavaScript that allow developers to create little widgets containing some of their application’s functionality. These widgets can then be used privately by the developer – or (if chosen) publicly by other application developers. Causes and iLike are two examples of applications that are currently making use of public custom FBML tags – check out the custom FBML tag directory to see the latest publicly available tags.

Other platform updates include the launch of Facebook Connect (hurrah!), the enhanced HTML and FBML support for email notifications and relaxation of email notification limits, and the ability to invite non-Facebook users to your application via email requests.

John spoke about how a chance meeting in San Francisco formed the beginnings of a relationship between Huddle and business social networking website, LinkedIn. The two companies have since been working closely to bring the online collaboration features of Huddle to the LinkedIn network. Early adoption is showing positive growth and take up has already been much more successful than a previous Facebook launch attempt.

I though that the most interesting talk of the evening was by Ivan Zoratti. He spoke of how the MySQL team have been working with Facebook to improve their application infrastructure. Although he refrained from going into too much detail – the high level Facebook statistics as of November 2008 seems quite astonishing:

• 130m active users (150m as of January 2009)
• 175m registered users
• 4m new users per week
• 5,000 page views per second
• 250,000 images served per second
• 26bn pictures on file
• 20,000 custom applications on the platform
• 10,000 servers in total
• The largest memcache setup in the world

Pictures and videos of this garage will follow shortly, the next Facebook Developer Garage London will be held in February 2009.

Photo: Chris Beach

There was also a ‘Celebrity Fan Site’ demo that showed just how easy it is to add multilingual search, news, videos, images and maps to a static website using the Google Web APIs and Javascript.

Google OpenSocial Campfire Chat
I found this campfire interesting as it focused on the development of the platform as much as the actual implementation of the technology. Emphasis was also placed on the importance of remembering that as we are dealing with an open standard, we as developers and consumers can contribute to the Google OpenSocial Specification and shape its future development.

Many of the floor questions seemed a little misguided as they were rather specific to an individual’s company or website. In reaction to this, panelist Dan Pieterson (Google, seventh from the left in the photograph) raised a very valid point that “OpenSocial provides common APIs, not common policies”. On a personal level I thought this was particularly valid as I have sometimes found that people have a tendency to seek reassurance for their business decisions from service providers when it is not really within their remit to comment.

Other topics of note included:

• Harvard Law’s Project VRM (Vendor Relationship Management) – From what I gathered from a high level, this is the ethical notion that networks and containers simply borrow data that is owned by a user in order to fulfill a value proposition.
• Google Friend Connect – Why go to your friends when they can come to you?
• Hi5 supports “Friend Circles” which allow developers to distinguish between relationship types (friend, colleague, acquaintance, lover?! etc.)
• Jeremiah from Slide mentioned that *some* networks are talking to application developers in order expand their marketing offering to larger brands.
• Apache Shindig – Because anybody can be an OpenSocial container..

Stands
I visited all of the stands at the event to find out what was going on, although I will admit that I was slightly biased towards OpenSocial and Android (what is it about shiny new technologies?!).

At the OpenSocial stand I was introduced to the surprisingly addictive real-time TypeRacer game on Orkut. Players are displayed as cars and the idea is that you type out a paragraph word for word, the higher your word per minute count, the faster your car goes…

Google Android seemed like a far less complete offering which is not surprising as it is a rather large proposition and the hardware isn’t due to be released until late this year. Still, after installing the Android SDK, the Eclipse IDE (complete with Android plugin) and sample Java code – I had a basic version of “snake” running on the emulator in next to no time. From a business perspective, I think that it will be interesting to see what kind of rich UI functionality the OpenGL support will make possible. Personally I would like to see an Amazon Ec2 instance monitor that would give you real time application statistics and alerts on your mobile device – a future project for RightScale perhaps?

Summary
Although it may seem that there is a lot of experimentation in the online sector at the moment; talking to various people has reinforced my assumption that developers (and savvy businessmen alike) are unified in their understanding of what ‘the open web’ is rapidly becoming. It is time to “think outside of the container” and bring the simplistic power of relevant social tools into our own websites and applications.

Picture: Flight of the Conchords