Yesterday I attended the Facebook Developer Garage London, which is a meeting of Facebook developers. The venue was an interesting choice - it was at the Bavarian Beerhouse. I reckon the venue are the people who have actually managed to monetize Facebook applications, with beers at four quid. It was pretty hot and the sound system was a bit crap. The room was packed and most people there had written a little Facebook application. Chatting to them, it seemed that most developers were confused about infinite session keys and PublishActionOfUser vs. PublishStoryToUser.
Anyway, Chamath Palihapitiya (VP Product Development, Facebook) was the keynote speaker: Facebook has 350 staff (Palo Alto, New York, Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles and recently London in Soho Square - which will be sales and business development at least for the next 12 months). 40m active users. Growing 3% a week. 5.2m in the UK. 50% return daily. 3k applications, with 100 new apps every day. He really likes "the power of the graph". Coming soon: more documentation, public bug tracker, I18N mid 2008. They do daily builds and push code live every night. "We are a tech company".
It was a fun evening and it was interesting how every programming language has good Facebook development support - although PHP seemed to be the most popular choice. Next month: monetization!
Re:What kind of apps are being written?
acme on 2007-09-14T08:47:02
Best way to find out is to log into Facebook and try some out.
