Talk by Mekin Maheshwari, weRead at facebook developer garage bangalore

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

4. Agenda

5. 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

6. 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

7. 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

8. 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

9. 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 ….

10. 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

11. 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!

12. 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.

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