After starting work more than 6 months ago, this is my first post on shift+control. To introduce myself, I’m Steve Lounsbury and I’m a web developer here at 76design. Prior to that I was a freelance developer and engineering student at Carleton University. The past 6 months have been awesome, a whirlwind tour of how we do things around here. That means that I’ve been super busy and not getting a lot of sleep — but I’ve been learning a lot! One of the things I’ve focussed my efforts on is keeping up with the world of social networking, social media and general (for lack of a less nauseating buzzword) Web 2.0 stuff. So, when the chance came up to check out FacebookCampToronto2, I had to jump on it.

It was a quick trip, leave Ottawa at 4:00pm, back the next day at 9:30am, but the time was well worth it. Here are the interesting talks that I’ll expand on a bit more:

• Ami Vora (Facebook.com) – High level presentation on platform and best-practices
• Roy Pereira – How Many ways can you Market your Application Inside Facebook?
• Jesse Hirsh – Top Applications and Why They Work
• Greg Thomson – Monetizing your Facebook Application

Before I start into the talks, here are two stats that I thought were pretty interesting:

• Facebook has gained 10,000,000 users since August (WOW)
• 84 of the 5500 applications on Facebook account for 90% of the usage.

High level presentation on platform and best-practices

It was cool to see Facebook make their presence known at the event. Ami Vora did a great presentation that was not only a good overview of the platform but also an interesting look at Facebook in general. She gave some points of advice to keep in mind when developing a Facebook app:

• Provide engaging content.
• Facebook is social, make your app social.
• Fresh content is key, give the users something to keep coming back for.
• Develop and iterate (get something out fast, get quick feedback from your users, make changes with that feedback in mind and iterate again)
• Keep privacy in mind, your users will appreciate it

Ami looked at the Photos application as an example of an application that uses the Facebook platform to provide users with engaging content. By tagging who is in the photo, the content is automatically routed to the exact people who care about it — the friends of the people in the photo.

How many ways can you market your application inside Facebook?

This talk touched on most (if not all) the ways you can market your app inside Facebook. Here is the list according to my notes:

• Ads (banners, fliers, sponsored groups, inside another app, in the profile box) — mostly have to pay for these and there are more creative ways to approach it.
• Application directory — boring “phonebook” style listing and its hard to differentiate yourself.
• Application page — you need to make this interesting, could be the difference between someone adding the app or not.
• Profile Page
• Your own profile — drop the application url into the website section of your contact info.
• Your status message
• Message attachments — when you write a message on someone’s wall, your application has the option to allow someone to attach something to that message (apparently its an underused feature)
• The share button
• Invite requests — make sure you have a fun message in there to peak interest.
• Notifications — good way to get a user’s attention.
• External email notifications — annoying, but your app can still do it.
• Minifeed — this is such prime ad space for your app.

Top Applications on Facebook

Great overview on what your app needs to do in order to make it big. The biggest point being to recognize that Facebook is a social platform and you need to make sure you are using every ounce of that capability. Unfortunately I didn’t take amazing notes during this talk as I was too busy paying attention. Great talk and it was worth the trip just for this one.

Monetizing a Facebook app

Greg Thomson started the hugely successful My Aquarium. In his talk he shared some pretty valuable information about what works best when monetizing Facebook apps. Essentially it boiled down to two ways: Pay per click ads through Google Ads or Appsaholic, and giving your user’s incentives to go fill out surveys or do other things that make you cash. The example he gave was giving a user coins for filling out a survey, which they can then use to send a fish to their friend (oh and making him 1.50 in the process for driving the user to the survey).

Greg also hinted at some of the dollar figures you can expect from a Facebook app. He goes by the rule of about $3 per active daily user (not per app install).

Overall, a rewarding event

I had fun at FacebookCampToronto2. It really opened my eyes to some of the opportunities out there on the Facebook platform. I had no idea the kind of money people are making on it (no wonder 76design has been asked to do a few Facebook apps!)

Some of the presentations are available here: http://refreshpartners.com/facebookcamptoronto2.php