Mekin Maheshwari - Facebook Developer Garage Bangalore

What’s special about the FB platform for a developer
MekinMaheshwari
weRead
August 2009

Agenda

Introduction -
Express, Discover & eventually Consume books
Live since June 2007 – V1 built by 2 engineers in 2 days (& nights )
Seen the FB platform evolve.
~400k - Monthly Active Users; ~2.8M – Total users
~62M books added by users to their bookshelf!
Rich data + social graph => Great recommendations
Comparable # of reviews for a lot of books to Amazon!
Power of Social - Expressing yourself to friends is a huge incentive
Also on Orkut, Myspace, Hi5, Ning, Yahoo, Bebo, Netlog, weread.com

What’s special about FB platform for a dev
Stable Platform
Constantly improving
Powerful & deep API
Automated checks & balances
Developer friendly & a strong developer community
Vociferous user community

Stable Platform – somewhat matured
A platform needs to be stable & dependable
Easy to get started : good libraries & documentation
Changes are on a schedule – Tuesdays
Information about changes shared well in advance
beta.facebook.com – test & validate what is coming!
Some blocker issues we have faced
FB DNS unable to resolve our URLs – we switched to IPs – was fixed quickly
FB api calls taking very long – engaged with FB devs to resolve this

Constantly improving
Some or the other enhancements pushed every Tuesday!!
Doing this while supporting such a large eco-system – Outstanding!
A few examples of improvements I have seen
Total installs -> Daily active users -> Monthly active users
News feeds : send entire newsfeed every call -> templates
No js -> FBJS -> FBJS in iframe (XFBML)
Fixed quota for all apps -> Quotas based on response
Analytics : # of installs -> Deep feature level analytics

Powerful & deep API
REST apis! With good client libs
Read APIs for almost all FB data
A lot of contextual integration points into the mother ship (Facebook)
Set profile content
Post news feed
Send notifications
Send emails
APIs for events, photos, marketplace ….

Mostly automated checks & balances
Quota of user communications decided based on user-response
A spammy application will see their quota of emails reducing rapidly
No manual intervention - Self-correcting system
Limits are not statically decided on Least Common Denominator
Applications that are engaging & communicate a lot are feasible

Developer friendly & a strong community
Tools – to help test each integration
beta.facebook.com – prepare for what is coming
Bugs – active bugzilla – working based on votes from devs
Discussion board – VERY active community
Analytics – Learn how users are using your application
Wiki for documentation – has solutions & workarounds!

Vociferous user community
Highly engaged community – tells you what to build
Easy for users to report/contact app developers.
weRead discussion board has 500+ topics.
A few large topics have 500+ posts.
The regular & direct communication with users has made this my most satisfying application development.

Questions?mekin.m@gmail.commmaheshwari@lulu.comaanand@lulu.com