Live Facebook Developers’ Garage - Yeah, Really Live

Posted on March 14th, 2008 in Networking, developer, facebook, garage, starbuck

807 PM Okay it’s on! I’m a bit late but the event still hasn’t started. Ran into problem connecting to Starbuck wireless, and that set me back a few minutes.
Our line up for tonight:

Chris Tan Chur Pim from Chur Associates.
Ganesh Kumar Bangah from MOL AccessPortal Berhad.
Jonathan Teoh from The Truly Loving Company

815 PM More line up

Kamal Faris from RSB
Ung Liu Lin From Shoes Shoes Shoes
Bikesh Lakhmichand from iTrain

817 PM Still waiting for the event to start. We are at Starbuck Bangsar Village 2, so if you are reading please come here

818 PM We are starting, all sort of people are here, those without knowledge of fb, avid fb users, beginners. Our MC is Bikesh from iTrain. Bikesh’s teacher is here!

819 PM Technite is about networking, like offline fb. Everybody invited to network. This is your platform for showing off what you got.

820 PM First speaker - Ganesh from MOL, youngest CEO of public listed company in Malaysia

821 PM Ganesh take the stage. Mic problem. Lol. “I have been entrepreneur all my life”. “First internet business while working in cyber cafe”. “In year 2000 there’s First Tuesday event for venture capital and developer.” “It’s easy to get fund from venture capitalist.

823 PM Web 1.0 cost a lot to build internet business. No revenue model. No Google back then. Not much ads revenue. “Tan Sri Vincent was angel investor for my venture”

825 PM “2003 company goes public listed” Suddenly Google come along, and Internet is hot again. Google help people create money from just their content.

Comparison: Web 1.0 – Business create content. Web 2.0 – User generated content.

Cost less to generate content and easier to make money. Plus Web 2.0 is a lot more realistic compared to Web 1.0.

828 PM Okay, now about fb. Talking about Mark Zuckerburg turned down 1 billion dollar offer. People think he is stupid. Then Microsoft buys part of share for a large amount. fb is unique although not the first community site. fb was the first to open itself up for people to create application. At no charge.

830 PM This handed over the power to people. “What amazed me is the amount of people I could link to”. Even easier to find people compared to Friendster. This is a marketing opportunity to promote products to millions of members easily.

832 PM Talk about started to look into investing on fb application. A 23 year old came out with an idea for people to easily find out what their friend want to do that night. Directly invested in that.

833 PM Back to MC, Bikesh. A word of advice “Careful when meeting new people in fb.” Passed mic to new MC – Vico from iTrain.

835 PM Now it’s Chris Tan time. He’s a lawyer. “Lawyer is a boring profession. People expect lawyer to be old and experienced.” “For me I want to be different – To be a successful lawyer, you don’t have to be old”

“Do believe in the power of the internet. I changed my website every year”

“Why do I join fb and all that?” Invited by a friend for multiple times, then agreed to join. “At the same time, was moving into new office, I uploaded a lot of new office photos to fb.” It’s a very different office compared t normal lawyer office. A lot of friend gave positive feedback on it.

“I got addicted, spend hours there and invited clients, created a group for client, and provide free legal advice there.”

841 PM fb experience. When meeting old friend, instead of saying goodbye, they say – see you on fb. We never really disconnected with our friend. No point saying goodbye.

To market in fb, it may not be with sole intention to sell. “I believe in sharing” If somebody knows you, they will trust you.

843 PM “If I put in my fb profile page about what I do, about all the legal stuff. I don’t think most of you would want to read about it because it’s not fun. The intention is to get closer with each and everyone of you. Keep in touch with old friends”

844 PM fb help build relationship with people. Please believe first rather than being suspicious. Just give it a try.

845 PM Q&A session

Q: Is fb real of a fad?
A: It’s real for me.
Q: What application helps leverage usage on fb?
A: Update status function.
Q: Do you make money on fb?
A: Directly, not yet.
Q: Plan for social marketing in future?
A: Run away from 80 90 era. fb play as role as commonplace for people to get to.

849 PM Question from the floor.
Q: How long been using fb?
A: Since November 2007. Want to use fb as marketing platform, for everybody in the company.

850 PM
Q: Will that be a security/privacy problem with giving legal advice online?
A: Not too sure, as always if there’s proof, then we can proceed.
Q: What happen if people think your law firm not serious?
A: Go to another law firm. People have their own perception.

“The world if different. I only serve people who appreciate me. We believe in quality of people we have. We deliver!”

Q: Comment on Intellectual Properties on fb application?
A: IP is old fashion. It’s all about sharing. If you see your pirated CD sold somewhere, then you must be damn good. So be proud of yourself. Get money from endorsement etc

855 PM Back to the MC. Pretty ladies going around giving goodie bags from MiRC. Next, we got virtual session from Leonard Lin. He creates sustainable fb application. We are on skype so everybody must keep quite. He’s in library!

857 PM Leornard starting, strategies for social network. Background – doing finance and IT. Saw opportunity to develop multiplayer games.

Created main fb app - Battle Stations. Extensive fb Ads and Goodle Adsense.

“We will cover about some of the platform. A lot of thing has change for the last 6 7 months. Daily percentage dropping.” Users fatigue.
900 PM New events, alliances between developers to gain more install base. No one really made huge amount of money

Typical lifecycle for fb app. Expect your user take up rate to start high and end low.

903 PM Categories app.
Friend communication
Content Sharing
Gifts
Fans – A company building multiple apps, small user base per app but total user base is high.
Utility
Dating - Not really recommended. More like a static page.
Social Gaming – Highest take up rate.
Quizzes – Popular among female user of fb

907 PM Developer Dirty Tricks
Q: Why would a developer sell an app that makes US5K a month for US15K?
A: Two reason, life span is short. Revenue from advertising can depleted based on season.

Q: Why do top app have 700K user removes and adds back about the same amount the next day?
A: Create second app, remove current app so user will have to add the new one since the old one is not there. Then next day add again.

911 PM How create popular and viral app. Tipping point theories.
66% of fb users are female. So leverage on this. Create app for female
Friend invites – Less effective but still effective. Force invite.
Facebook.gaiatools.com/skipinvite/ - can be used to cheat certain app

914 PM Battle stations! Manage to hit it. There’s a high surge for the last couple of weeks.

What makes an App sustainable?
Keep getting new users because user will get bored. Find ways to advertise. Sense of community help stickiness. User created content. Let the user be creative and build the community.
For games then stop cheating. Clean game attracts more users. fb won’t do anything about it. So it’s your job.

Monetization
As always use ads or virtual item sales

918 PM Example users created content.
Battle Station! Pageant. User organized.
Fan fiction. User organized.

Advertising
Public ad network/ fb Ad network ~0.01 per CPM – low payment
Premium ad network ~ 0.30 – 1.00 per CPM /CPI – higher rate. Pay per impression, so that’s good for developer.
CPA Networks ~ 1.00 – 10.00 per Action - higher payout but only if there’s action
Direct Ad Sales ~10,000 – 35,000 per deal (6mth contract) – a lot more work to get it

921 PM Virtual goods sales. Good way to make money.
Summary.
First build an app, then build suite of app and create cross promotion. Mix of spam and fad app to promote sustainable app.
Need to sell ads or virtual item to make money.
Got to have strategies to attract investor and do not constrain to just fb only.

924 PM Back to MC. For some reason he sounds better without mic. Next stop Kamal Fariz from RSB. About Ruby on Rails and fb.

926 PM Kamal starts. “So you want to build a Facebook app?”
Basic ingredient:
Use fb’s developer app. Help you to build an app.
Then use Ruby on Rails. Help you build app very fast. Hundreds of plugin for it, even for fb. Yeah you guess it – rfacebook plugin.

928 PM Step 1 – Setup a new application from the developer app. Then find a super cool name. For this demo – Super Gifts.
Mechanic – “When user use application, fb will then make request to the app server then spits it back to the user. User won’t notice it.”

He’s going through all options in Create New App.

933 PM Step 2 – Create a Rails app. Rails is fullstack framework for developing database back web applications bal bla bla…to long to type. In a nutshell – Rails is basically bunch of stuff to make developer happy.

Now step-by-step terminal demo.

Note: Create ssh tunnel to developer’s home machine.

What happen when you access an app? From fb forward to your server, then the server spits it back, fb will take it in, the mesh it up with their platform and show it to user.

937 PM Making things look right. Everything the same as developing normal web app, except for javascript.
FBML – specifically for fb.

940 PM Still explaining about FBML

942 PM Making things act right. It’s time to use API. Fb serious about security. Continue demo.

944 PM Step 3 - ???? (this is exactly what appear in his slide)

944 PM Step 4. Profit!!

944 PM wow, that’s pretty fast. Now displaying list of rails resources. Talk about Malaysia.rb meet up.

946 PM Quick session from Cisco. Cisco express network-on-wheels. Checkout http://cisco.com/go/my/ciscoexpress/smi

950 PM Inviting panelists for roundtable session.
Daniel from ideaprenuer.net
Yiu Lin from Shoes Shoes Shoes
Jonathan from The Truly Loving Company. Revenue goes to charity.
Kamal from RSB
Chris as moderator. Now waiting for question.

Q: For Jonathan – how to get in charity list?
A: Got to be audited and must be established. At the moment there are five charities.

Q: From Andrew – Different between wiki and fb? Profiling all the jokers (politician).? A: Answer from Kamal – Why fb? fb just for promotion. Display newsfeed from wiki. On the other hand, wiki is standalone, as of right now there is no known wiki interfacing with fb.

Added by Daniel – Look at politic now app in fb. Votercentral.

1002 PM Q: If we put something up in fb, and it’s personal, what are chances being sued?
A: Whatever on web, people can takes action, no one can stop. The question now is can it be successful or not? Comes down to proof. So far, not much of success.

Q: For Yiu Lin – How fb and internet help your business?
A: Help in marketing. Start off with email broadcast. Then in fb, a way to build personal relationship with customer. “First couple of days we got few hundreds friends”. Easy to communicate. And build hype about the thing we love – shoes. In next month online store will open. Big applause! Good luck!

Q: Conversion rate from fb to sales?
A:10% conversion, problem with credit card acceptance. Jonathan actually advertises on fb, bid on ads. Link it on fan page, able to analyze users. Very effective in getting new users. People actually recommend and other will trust. It provides two ways communication between customer and seller.

1007 PM Q: How long will fb last?
A: They said back then, Google would not survive, now a big 80-pound gorilla. fb still in infancy, social network is here to stay. It’s all about the content, if great content is there, people will come.

1011 PM Q: How do we monitor and encourage developer to become entrepreneur?
A: It’s still evolving. With the money behind the app, no doubt developer will become entrepreneur. No different between fb app developer with web app developer. Government support example, Israel – bring top startups for Silicon Valley tour. Help the entrepreneur to see the reality, there’s money in this.

MiRC and ideapreneur organized event so we can work together and promote Malaysia to where it suppose to be.

1016 PM Q: For Shoes Shoes Shoes - How many hours spent in handling and monitoring – 1000 users?
A: Horrible, 3 hours a day. But you can’t ignore the user.

Q: For Jonathan – What’s your click through rate?
A: Around 1 – 2 %.

1020 PM Q: Tips on developing fb app?
A: Strongly believe in 37 Signals Getting Real philosophy. Don’t use rfacebook plugin, use facebooker. The only problem is hosting and scaling.

1024 PM Q: How to build sustainable app?
A: What does it mean to make it big in fb need to change; the value is in the long tail. Not much of current traffic.

1027 PM Q: What your view on mobile social networking?
A: fb can be used for mobile. But it can only take off with large data user. Unless there are mentalities changes for mobile user, then there won’t be more adoption for mobile social networking. Not success stories yet.

1030 PM Okay, Starbuck is closing, so we have to wrap it up here. Till next time!

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