8 posts tagged “facebook”
SinglePostcard is our latest Facebook application. It lets you create postcards using your own uploaded or online photos and have them mailed anywhere in the world.
- High resolution postcards are printed with no branding, advertising or logos.
- The regular price will be $2 to anywhere.
- Early adopting users can send two postcards free, anywhere in the world. Currently this is a limited offer for the first few hundred users.
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A unique feature of SinglePostcard is its social discounting system. The price permanently falls to $1.20 for the first eight friends to send a card. But if eight of your friends have already sent a card using singlepostcard, you get no discount and will always have to pay the full $2. So don't get left behind, sign up and use the app early!
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Recipients of cards receive a 20% discount code that they can use to send a reply or to send a card to another person. The discount code is printed discretely on the back of the card, but can be turned off if you find this intrusive.
The URL should be at */singlepostcard on Facebook. Until the launch time (see below) we'll be doing some final testing of the site so this URL might not work until then.
We plan to launch worldwide by 8 pm Sunday (San Francisco), 11 pm Sunday (New York), 4 am London (London), 1 pm (Sydney).
I've just released a new version of my first Facebook application, Matchthis. It is radically different, but still matches users. It uses multimedia. Images right now, other types of media later. And it has a few innovative twists coming up soon. Take a look.
On Wednesday, at AOL in Mountain View, my Bay Area Facebook Application Development Meetup and about 150 of its members will meet to discuss and present Facebook applications.
This time, I will be presenting one of my applications, called Social Score. Essentially this is a dashboard for your social network. The following video presentation will be shown to members to quick a very quick (4 minute) overview of the application. You can see a lower resolution version of this video below.
You can also try out the actual application, if you have a Facebook account, by going to http://apps.facebook.com/socialscore.
p.s. Video from our last Facebook Development meetup (Source: Hiren P., meetup member):
http://qik.com/video/38729
http://qik.com/video/38721
See http://del.icio.us/Chanezon/opensocial for Google's Patrick Chanezon bookmarks on OpenSocial.
According to Google, more than 250 people showed up. People I have met liked it, and it certainly looked good in pictures.
Incidentally, I also was shown an interesting Vietnamese knockoff of Facebook's website, "faceViet".
I try to keep my Facebook Application Development Meetups happening on a regular basis, even when I am out of Silicon Valley. About a week ago, I was discussing with some members about where we could hold a meeting this month. We had our last and largest one at AOL. Now that attendance was expected to be 80 or even more than a hundred, free venues were getting harder to find. Places like Spock, who had hosted past meetups were now too small. We could ask AOL again. Microsoft was an option, but I was told one had to have a good reference from someone there, and even then it took several weeks to make things happen. With Google's announcement of a competing OpenSocial social network platform, one member pointed out that Google was one of the places we now could no longer consider for holding a Facebook meeting.
Or was it!? It struck me later that Google was the perfect place to hold a meeting about Facebook application development because OpenSocial was perceived as a competing platform. Every Facebook developer was keenly interested in learning about the implications of OpenSocial, and how readily they could develop for this new platform. Many wonder if they should adjust their social network application development strategy: perhaps they should switch platforms, or develop for both. At the same time Google should see the audience of existing and prospective Facebook developers as an ideal target for educating about OpenSocial.
Put this way, Google seemed the best target location for our next meeting. And folks at Google agreed and were very helpful and enthusiastic. They have provided us with space for 125 people, food, and an expert on OpenSocial to present on the subject. Sudha Jamthe a member and blogger who MC'd the AOL meetup worked with Dave McClure, a particularly prominent social network blogger (500hats) who will be Master of Ceremonies at the Google meetup.
So there you have it: a very cool meetup at Google on Monday November 19th at 6:30pm. You should go if you are in town. To learn more about the location, agenda, and members, see the meetup page or the Facebook event page or the parent Facebook Application Development group.
Today, I present some important Web 2.0 trends. When I left to work at Morgan Stanley in Manhattan, not one of these were on the public radar. Now many dominate the mindshare of Internet users. Not being in the mix when these things came out was part of the price I paid for my time in New York.
I added Spock to the list because I believe that new search engine could have a profound impact on the Internet. They are forming an engine that could create a socially validated identify for people on the Internet, extracted and compiled from a wide range of social networks and self publishing websites. (Incidentally, they are hosting a Lunch 2.0 event tomorrow). Some of the Spock engineers are also Facebook developers as a natural extension of their work.
Facebook has been my focus since I have been back in Silicon Valley. I started the Facebook Application Development Meetup and associated group on Facebook. I started regular hackouts in which independent Facebook Developers get together to work alongside each other on their various applications, usually in a coffee shop. I also, of course, have been working on my own Facebook application.
Facebook is very important in the U.S., and is surprisingly dominant in Canada, and important in the U.K., and Australia.
Facebook does well in the English speaking world, but is poorly prepared to deal with the rest of the non-english world. Indeed, they did not even conceive of such obvious things as storing foreign postal codes. They refer only to U.S. zip codes, and store them as numeric values, so Canadian and British alphanumeric postal codes can not be collected or stored.
In this context, it is quite impressive that not one of Facebooks top cities is in the United States. The top cities are shown below.
The information in today's posting comes from Google Trends.
There is still a justifiable feeling in Silicon Valley that one is in the capital of the Internet world. I can go to events such as the monthly Churchill Club and the annual Tech Crunch party and be inspired by other entrepreneurs. And now, close to twelve years after I first arrived here, I am delighted to find I still have a good network here, especially among friends who are now CEOs of their own successful ventures. And furthermore, people in California continue to go out of their way to help people be successful. I appreciated this when I first arrived in 1995, and it continues today. Sean Ness (Institute for the Future and STIRR) was one such person who went out of his way to provide great advice and introductions at Tech Crunch.
And, as an amusing aside, let me tell you that I was surprised to see the strange dichotomy between men and women at the Techcrunch party. Most of the women were beautifully dressed, compared to the men. And I am hardly complaining about that. One woman who stood out in this regard was Julia Allison and has caused a bit of buzz as a result, both online (in video and print) and offline.
But networks here can be built as quickly as new technology startups, and mine continues to grow in this fashion. Partly due to discussions at the Churchill Club, I've spent several weeks developing Facebook applications, and a network of other developers with the same interest. I started the Facebook Development Meetup in Silicon Valley. It was very well attended. And through that, I organized a Facebook Hackathon, which ended up being a Saturday afternoon community programming and help session, which was great too. Krillion (a shopping research startup) made all the difference for that event by offering space in their offices. We hope to do something like it again soon.
With these events as a backdrop, I've managed to make great progress on my new application with help from programmers in India and Vietnam. I have spent a lot of time developing in Coupa Cafe on Ramona street just off University in Palo Alto. As it happens, this place is just down the street from Facebook's engineering group.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tdNguO6SzU4