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Talk by Mekin Maheshwari, weRead at facebook developer garage bangalore
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What’s special about the FB platform for a developer
Mekin MaheshwariweReadAugust 2009
1 Introduction – weRead
2 What’s special about the FB platform for devs
0 Q & A – is during the presentation. Make it interactive
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.
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