We recently had the Johannesburg Facebook Developers Garage and I made extensive notes during the different speakers presentations. Since they gave them to us I’m use they won’t mind me sharing them. Naturally I will give credit where credit is due so if anyone minds me sharing what they said, please contact me via the post and I will remove the content. That being said I doubt it’ll happen. It was a very informative evening and some tips came up that all serious facebook developers should ernestly consider. I absolutely loved every single presentation and no-one bored me in the slightest, so if I don’t have any of your content here its because I want to focus this post solely on application considerations and not statistics.

Grant Fleming (Fontera)

——————————-

First off, before I say anything, here’s a link to a video taken of his presentation at the event: MyVideo Link.

For me personally Grant’s presentation was probably the most informative. He raised many very important points.:

1) Come up with a good, descriptive and catchy name for your application!

2) Make your applications useful as well as fun.

3) Be careful with invites, Facebook can and will BAN you if you’re not careful. So don’t spam the developer forums and other people’s posts.

4) Make sure you interact with your users. Listen to what they have to say and remember that they are ultimately your customers.

5) If you expect your app to work well, host the application outside of South Africa. We all know how expensive bandwidth is here and for example, Fontera’s applications moved over 4 Terabytes in one month!!!!

6) Although it may not seem good, if you are having scalability issues it is actually a good thing, depending on how quickly you sort it out. If you’re app faces too much downtime users will remove it more often than not.

7) Try not to make too many successive API calls as the FB API can be slow at times.

Make sure that you know all the POST variables of the FB API. This can come in very handy!

9) Make use of the Developer forums on Facebook. If you’re battling with something, chances are that 7 other developers have just overcome that problem!

10) Database Management is a serious activity if you want a serious FB application. Make sure the database is well indexed! If needed, de-normalize your database.

11) Remember to monetize your application. Make use of Advertising such as social media and Video Egg. This can generate much needed income!

Tyler Reed (Younique)

——————————-

Now here’s a young guy with passion for waht he does and how he does it. Definitely the most lively and enteraining presentation of the evening!

1) Understand your target user market for your application and what they want/need.

2) Try make use of technologies such as AJAX as this immediately impresses most people and it is generally extremely useful.

3) Install Google Analytics to track your traffic.

4) Interact with your users as much as possible.

5) Try keep your application’s interaction as interesting as possible.

6) Be prepared for scalability issues for your application.

7) Get your application out into the community as soon as possible! You think your idea is amazing, problem is 500 other developers might have exactly the same idea!

Once your application is available then worry about presentation of it and non essential stuff like that.

If you want to see Tyler’s presentation then check it out here: http://www.slideshare.net/tylerreed/facebook-m-xit-me

Eben de Wit (Microsoft)

——————————-

I’m sure he was expecting it but he got slightly bashed for being from Microsoft, either way, he still had a great presentation. He demonstrated a new application from MS called PopFly. It is currently in Alpha but looks promising for people who want to create applications but why aren’t developers. This is bascially a click and drag interface, then once you’re done, you simply export it to facebook and then its available. It is hosted on the PopFly website so check it out for useage restrictions as I’m sure there have to be some form of restrictions.

PopFly

Juan Roldan (Mentez)

——————————-

Juan was the final speaker for the evening and gave one of the most thought provoking presentation. Very interesting stuff, for this you HAD to be there to understand. I will try summarize what I got out of it but he was great!

1) You must be commited to your application.

2) Have your motivations clear for why you love this application and why you think its relevant.

3) Make sure you application has a target market!

4) Try think of something unique and useful. Something users will access/need on a daily basis. This is where his talk got interesting! You “demonstrated” brainstorming by asking a single question. “What is half of thirteen?”. The stuff we came up with was insane and nothing to do with numbers at all!

5) Target advertisers in your application to generate revenue. Example: Guy created an application whereby you could mark where in the world you had been. A few months later we sold the application for over 4 million US $ to a flight agency/airline.

6) Never fear Failure. The worst that can happen is that you fail, all you do then is try again!

7) When starting with your application, include a lot of local content BUT think globally for future use.

Build a separate website for your application.

9) When you initially start advertising your app to friends and family, target “champions”. Get someone influencial to use your application because if they use it, people who look up to them will use the application!

10) Try and make your application accessible from mobile devices.

11) Create tutorials for using the application if needed.

12) Always make the application using the English Language as it truely is the “universal” language.

All in all, it was an amaing evening and I would like to thank Armand and Arno for organizing everything and setting it up. It is much appreciated!

On a personal side note, I will be attending the Johannesburg Microsoft DevChat tomorrow discussing Visual Studio 2008 and its impending release and its new features. I cannot wait as I also get to spend the day with some old colleagues from the greatest company I’ve worked for thus far (www.signify.co.za). So to Johan and Gavin, see you in the morning!