Archive for the ‘Interviews’ Category
What is “Social Search”? SMX Interview
Wednesday, March 19th, 2008Santa Clara, CA - 2008
Allfacebook interviewed Facebook’s Aditya Agarwal at Search Marketing Expo’s SMX West. Aditya is Facebook’s Director of Search Engineering, responsible for search strategy, search product management and overseeing the engineering team responsible for new product development related to search.
AF: Please explain “social search” for the layman reader…
Aditya: Social search involves combining social graph information with pure algorithmic search results. The two are really not that different. The real question is how to use the information in the graph. There is a great variety of information that can be found in the social graph. For instance, you have friend connections, information you post about yourself and the apps that are found on your page. My team develops methods for combining that information in useful ways to help rank the results users get when they perform searches on Facebook. The core issue is this: As opposed to set of data that is returned as a search result, we extra data on top of that related to the user and use this to make the data returned more valuable. The exact details of how we do this are proprietary to Facebook. Here is an example of the way it works for a user: If you do a search of people for “Matt”, we will show you results from within your network, from your geographic area, etc. This helps ensure a high probably relevant result for you. This use of the graph to filter results can be used in searches for groups to join, events to attend and so on.
AF: What is Facebook’s unique advantage in social search?:
Aditya: Facebook’s best advantage is our complete and accurate social graph. Out competitors suffer from inaccurate graphs. Think about it, if a social network’s graph is not accurate, where 20% of the nodes and 20% of the edges are not real, then the social search results are confused and therefore not as valuable. Its hard to tell the full extent damage when a large part of your social graph is not real – but it certainly devalues their graph. Facebook’s graph is full of real people, taking real actions and using real semantics.
AF: What do you think Facebook’s long term influence on social search will be?:
Aditya: Facebook will give users most accurate search results based on the most accurate social graph.
AF: What are second order effects? Why are they so important for marketers participating in social media?:
Aditya: Second order effects are influences that reach you from beyond your immediate network. Marketers can think about it from the perspective of a hotel operator: You will encounter a hotel by virtue of the fact that a friend reviewed the hotel, not because you are friends with the hotel. Also, you will be influenced by the fact your friend had a positive interaction with the hotel - this is a second order effect when this gets filtered through to you on Facebook. Marketers themselves cannot always make a direct connection with a consumer. My team works to understand a marketer’s placement in the entire graph, and how they might fit in search results that are influenced by the “localized area” of the social graph for a particular user. Keep in mind that the localized area is different for every user, and therefore the results for a particular query are different for each user. For search marketers, the difference between being a 1st and 2nd result can be how important a friend’s interaction is to the user’s query.
AF: Are there unique technology challenges in working with the social graph?
Aditya: Facebook maintains massively distributed databases. My team is responsible for determining best way to store, access and understand this data for social search.
AF: You said on your panel that at the end of the day, real world relationships do not change. What do you mean by this?:
Aditya: A lot of people think that “real world” means “physical” relationship. This is not how we think about it. People have interactions in the physical and the online worlds that form basis of relationships. We are challenged with capturing the subtlety of these interactions in systems that can inform social search results. It’s important to be able to take IM, Emails, posts, etc. and couple this with physical interactions. Facebook is able to capture the intersection of these two in a way that is both accurate and subtle.
AF: It seems like quite an exciting challenge to make sense of all the user generated content generated on Facebook, particularly non-text content like images and video.
Aditya: My hypothesis is this: As the number of content types, publishers, and volume of ratings increases, traditional measurements used by current search engines to determine global ranking cannot scale. Facebook understands that finding the most relevant results is really about your social graph. In a way, it’s similar to Google’s Page Rank for referring sites, which also makes intuitive sense. However, you will probably find that the content generated by people in your social graph a more accurate way of determining search results.
Interview With A Facebook Professor
Wednesday, September 26th, 2007
Last night I got to speak with Dave McClure who will be teaching the “Create Engaging Web Applications Using Metrics and Learning on Facebook” class with Professor BJ Fogg at Stanford University starting Thursday. Below are a few of the questions that I had the opportunity to ask Dave.
What is the new class about?
Really about building engaging web applications and using user engagement metrics to figure out what makes the right set of features and right set of marketing and promotional channels to use. Using Facebook as a lab environment. We are going to use a 5-step model for user engagement:
- Acquisition - where are users coming from?
- Activation
- Retension - email and other things to get them to return
- Referral
- Revenue/Monetization
Are you going to be focusing primarily on Google analytics or will it also involve specific user demographics?
I think so. Right now one of the biggest issues for us to explore as the class, and really kind of interesting when involving both Google and Facebook in figuring this out is how do we get those two schools to work together and also what other tools we might use to figure out the metrics that we are trying to collect. Charlie Sheever was the developer at Facebook who implemented the fb:google-analytics code and I’ve been trying to connect with him and folks at Google analytics to see how they are progressing with that and trying to develop it further. In addition to that we are working with a couple other companies; probably Social Media and Adonomics to see what they are doing.
Those are quantitative solutions. There are also ways to collect qualitative data that are based on user surveys and sample data; maybe even doing just user monitoring and testing. It is not exclusively about quantitative data, although that is one of the more significant goals, but really more about building that model and thinking about your product development and product marketing process using that framework.
Facebook is going to have to launch some sort of analytics software if they are going to launch an ad network.
They probably are looking to roll out more in the metrics area. We are looking forward to working with them to get a better sense of where they are headed on that. It is possible that we will work with Facebook, Google or a third party company that is developing and building off of whatever Facebook offers, that we can put that stuff together. Definitely we don’t have all the answers right now. The platform itself is still maturing, developing, it’s a moving target. Even outside of Facebook, I think a lot of the concepts that I’m presenting, are ones that people are still experimenting with.
I know a lot of people who are doing general website development that don’t really have these models in place very well yet. I do think it’s really important for startups to have a simple set of metrics that they watch and actually do a lot of A-B testing around those metrics when they are building features and trying to measure deeper down the conversion funnel before marketing channels. Understand what’s working and what’s not working at bringing visitors to the site or getting users to install the app and use it on a regular basis.
You said Facebook will be involved. How involved?
I’m still talking with those folks. I’m hopeful they will speak at one or two classes. We also have some folks from Google who are going to be speaking at one or two classes. Part of the structure of the course is really that Prof. B.J. Fogg and myself will be presenting on a topic. The class is a 3 hour class on Thursdays that is more presentation then team oriented and then a lab on Tuesdays that is more self-paced development. In terms of Thursday classes we will try to bring in outside speakers in addition to our own talks and someone who is actually doing project management, doing project marketing, building a facebook app or potentially Facebook bloggers and VCs that are interacting with startups.
The goal is to give them a set of real world experiences with people who are doing those functions in startup companies in the valley. Internally with the students in the class we are trying to structure them in 3 person teams: either 2 developers and one business marketing person or one developer and one product manager/product marketing person. This is so that they really get the full experience of building a startup team and working together to put together their app and do the marketing.
What do you consider a successful application to be?
Our goals are to have each of the teams build two different types of apps during the course of the semester:
- One will be measuring based on acquisition metrics. The goal will be a broad use case app, applicable to a lot of people, lite-weight like a Zombies or profile badge type of application.
- The other type of app is going to be more depth of engagement metric. Very narrow use case probably around education topics but the goal is to see more depth of user engagement: repeat visits and retention time being the key metrics there.
We’re trying to contrast those two different styles of app development and in fact will probably be using the first set of apps to market the second ones. Also, having the class cross-market each other apps as well. That’s one of the benefits of working in an environment where we have 10 or 20 teams working together. They can use each of their apps to cross-market to each other. At the end of the semester we might be able to build an application network within Stanford. One benefit is that some of the students in the class have already built Facebook apps.
Mashable said the concept of grading based on number of users seems somewhat flawed. Do you see any issues with this method of grading?
I think they misinterpreted the grading. Perhaps a very small percentage of the grade will be based on active users but I think we will be looking for a good split between breadth of use and depth of use. In one sense we might look at active users and number of referrals as a measure of success but in others we might look at time spent or pageviews or repeat visit behavior as success.
The apps themselves are not the only measure of success. We will be looking at class participation, what they are doing or how they are interacting with their teams. There will also be an expo at the end of the year where we will bring in a panel of judges. Hopefully we get folks like Arrington and other VCs. We might actually see some applications that come out of this and get funded.
When does the class start?
Thursday. We are hoping to put together a set of course materials to place on the web at the end of the semester. We will also try to videocast some of the sessions.
Talking With the RockYou Co-Founder
Friday, August 24th, 2007
RockYou, the social network widget development company, has had a significant presence on Facebook. RockYou has been extremely successful so far with their most popular application, Likeness, obtaining over 5 million users. I had the opportunity to speak with Jia Shen, the Chief Technology Officer and Co-Founder of Rock You.
What is your position at RockYou and what does your job consist of?
I’m the CTO / Co-founder. I make sure we’re doing all the right things as far as the product goes. I do a little bit of everything from product design, graphic design, programming, to IT / Operations. In a company this size, we kinda all do everything.
How involved have you been with the development of your Facebook applications?
I personally developed many of our apps. I still spend the majority of my day doing development.
What percentage of your company resources have been dedicated to Facebook application development?
About 70% of our development resources are on Facebook.
What do you think the most important components of an application are in order for them to be successful?
There are a variety of different types of applications, but the most successful ones are what we call “engagement” applications. These are apps that leverage social interactions between a user and their friends. They entice users to engage with one another and really spread virally very naturally.
What features have been most critical to your various applications’ success?
The most important functionality are those that properly leverage viral channels. The number one page on Facebook is the News Feed page, so anything that an application does to show up on that page is time well spent. Minifeed posts, Application invites, and notifications all bring applications to a users attention.
I’ve heard that RockYou is offering advertising services for application developers, is this true? Would it be possible to elaborate about what services you are providing exactly?
We’ve developed an advertising network that helps developers properly monitize their applications, and helps new developers grow their user base. These advertising services are unique in the way that they only appear at the end of a user experience. When an application has finished engaging with the user, they display our ad placements. They don’t really draw from the user experience like typical banner advertising. They also pay a lot better. Our publishers are seeing something like 40$ CPM on these pages. We’re seeing huge uptake on both the advertiser and publisher fronts. This has proved to be very successful for monetizing and user acquisition for our partner applications.
I’ve heard that you are currently charging application owners over $1.00 per application installation. Is this an accurate figure?
This is a system that’s constantly being tweaked, but we’ve seen numbers from .50 to above a dollar based on the day of the week and actual ad placement.
What future plans does RockYou have for Facebook applications?
With over 50% of Facebook users that have RockYou applications on their profiles, we’ll definitely keep cranking out Facebook applications. We are starting to focus more on initiatives to help the Facebook Developer community monetize.
Is there a specific number that Rock You has found to be critical mass of an application before it goes viral?
If an application is extremely viral, it should really just take off from no seeding at all. Applications like our Likeness took off without any seeding. It just flew off the shelves. There are a few key factors:
- Fundamental viral potential: How easy do users convert to adding the application. How likely are they to convert their friends.
- The pervasiveness of the target audience: Is the audience of the application all of Facebook, or is it targeted towards a smaller subset.
Do you know the demographics of users on your application? If so, what is the average age of your application users?
Depending on the application, the male to female ratio varies greatly, but the average age is around 21.
What has been the biggest challenge for RockYou in developing Facebook applications?
It’s definitely being able to maintain our focus. The Facebook platform is so flexible and still rapidly changing that the full product and business potential is mostly unrealized. We’ve had a hard time balancing the desire to develop many more applications with the need to refine our current ones.
Is there anything else you would like to have me mention with this interview?
We’ve got some cool ideas cooking, look out for them in the coming weeks and months for sure!
Amit Gupta on an Amazin’ Facebook App
Monday, July 23rd, 2007
I had the opportunity to speak with Amit Gupta following the launch of his popular Amazin’ Giftbox application. Amit has launched a number of applications already but the Amazin’ Giftbox has been growing at a rapid pace. I have spoken with Amit on a number of instances regarding Facebook development. He has an impressive resume. He co-wrote a book titled “The Big Moo,” founded the daily jolt which is now the home screen for computers across a number of college campuses, brought BarCamp to New York City, worked with Seth Godin to start a non-profit called “Change This,” and was one of the Facebook platform launch partners. Since the launch of the platform he has created a number of applications. Below is my interview with Amit.
So a couple days ago on your post you mentioned that your Amazin’ Giftbox application (that we profiled on AllFacebook.com) was growing at 20% a day. Are you still experiencing rapid growth?
Yeah, it’s been kind of astonishing that the pace has kept up and even accelerated as time has gone on. The actual rate of daily growth has varied –up to 25%+ some days, down to 6% other days. Some of it is cyclical according to expected Facebook traffic variations, the rest is based on other factors like platform uptime issues, etc.
So far over 70,000 people have added the application. Do you keep statistics as to what percentage of those are actually active users?
Not at the moment, though we are starting to develop a more robust statistics collection framework.
The application is obviously built for the purpose of generating revenue and allowing the users to have fun while they use it. Have you been able to generate any measurable amount of revenue?
Actually we launched it with a few goals in mind–adding a new fun app to facebook and making some affiliate revenue were definitely part of it, but we also wanted to get some more experience building high-traffic, high-user applications on facebook and learning how to deal with some of the scaling issues on this particular platform.
We’re starting to talk to people about developing larger-scale applications on the facebook platform — I’ve assembled a small team of developers that are taking on this kind of work, people with expertise developing on existing platforms and APIs (facebook, Flickr, Amazon’s API, Salesforce.com) There’s a lot of issues that are unique to developing on a platform as opposed to developing for the web, and learning how to overcome and work around those issues for each platform requires you to actually build apps and make mistakes. Giftbox grew fast — 90,000 users in just a few weeks and should top 100,000 soon. It’s given us a great opportunity to poke at this platform and learn the ins and outs.
Do you think that creating applications with the aim of generating revenue from sources other than advertising is a wise decision?
I think non-advertising sources of revenue make a lot of sense, whether you’re developing on the naked web or on a platform, absolutely. Facebook has been very open and inclusive in letting companies monetize in whatever ways they come up with, and I think you’ll see some really interesting developments in this area in the near future.
From your experience what were the biggest challenges in developing your application?
Facebook is a new platform, and it’s constantly changing. The API’s evolving, restrictions on what you can do are changing, things that worked last week might no necessarily work this week. It’s not like developing your own web app or desktop app, there’s a lot more variables to consider. And that’s before you even start thinking about the social impact these apps and the behavioral and attitudinal changes you’re starting to see as users start to embrace applications in facebook.
What advice would you give to those that are looking to develop their own application?
If it’s a simple app and you have technical skills, dive right in and figure it out. If you’re planning on doing something more robust to support a lot of users, don’t have technical skills, or want to add an app to supplement an existing business, consider hiring dedicated developers for the task or hiring an outside team.
Many of the more popular apps really grew out of control as the original developers and companies found they didn’t have the experience needed to scale and couldn’t support the large number of users jumping on board. Now we’re starting to see the opposite problem: companies putting up apps without a good understanding of how applications should behave in the facebook ecosystem and the opportunities the platform offers. As a result, their apps languish with just a few hundred users.
I know that you have been involved as well as created a number of other web startups including Photojojo. Two questions: One, Are you looking to take a break and focus only on Facebook applicaitons? Second, do you plan on building Facebook applications for your existing websites?
I was one of the launch partners for the facebook platform, so Photojojo had an app ready on the day of the launch. Sadly, it was much like some of the apps I mentioned above — not designed to take advantage of the facebook ecosystem. We might do another one that’s a bit more platform-savvy.
While I’m not taking a break from my normal work, I am working with a few partners to develop facebook apps for others, I think there’s an opportunity here to architect and build robust platform applications, and it’s a space I’m really interested in.
If you would like to get in touch with Amit you can go get all his info at AmitGupta.com.
Talking With Facebook’s Music Master
Tuesday, July 10th, 2007There has been a significant amount of buzz surrounding Numair Faraz’s Facebook application, Audio. I questioned whether Audio would keep running back in May. Three weeks later, the Wall Street Journal referenced Numair when discussing Facebook’s enthusiastic team of outside developers who are not on Facebook’s payroll. Numair truly has a dynamic personality. He dropped out of college at 16 (not a bad age to drop out) and is now attempting to challenge the music industry head on. Numair’s Audio application is still growing at a rate of 1 to 2 percent a day which isn’t bad when you have close to 1 million users using your application (and for any website this is still phenomenal growth). I had the opportunity to speak with Numair and ask him a few questions about his extremely popular application.
First of all let me say congratulations on the success with the Audio application. I noticed a mention in the Wall Street Journal a couple weeks ago. Did you drop out of college to create this Facebook application?
No, I dropped out of college when I was, like, 16. I was living in La Jolla, and girls and surfing seemed to be a better use of my time than boring engineering stuff. In retrospect, I was correct!
Sounds like a good choice! Your Audio application still seems to have pretty steady growth. Did you expect such a large adoption?
Not at all. I wrote Audio for myself, as a test application. I wanted to play an MP3 on my web server as an audio file on my Facebook profile page, so I wrote it up. I added features to let other people use the app and add their own links to files, but seriously now — it’s 2007, who has links to MP3s on web servers? I didn’t think it would become very popular, because of this major shortfall… But I guess I underestimated the Facebook population’s love of music. I should note that I don’t really judge the app by the number of users it has, but rather by the value it provides to those using it. Even if only 4 people used it, but they loved it, I would be happy — I’m not part of this very unhealthy thing going on with a lot of the app developers right now where they are entirely obsessed with growing their user numbers. So immature and pointless!
A quick glance at the recent uploads shows the application handling 3 to 4 song uploads a minute but there doesn’t seem to be any downtime. How did you prepare for scalability?
Well, I think a lot of that is due to the fact that Audio is an utterly efficient application. It does a couple things and does them (hopefully!) well. Because of this simplicity, it was easy for me to transition from a single server to a few more when the time arose.
Wow, so you are handling all the scalability, not using Amazon S3?
Ask me again in about 2 weeks, as I’m making some changes…
If you take a look at the songs being uploaded via the Audio application, the majority of the songs are copyrighted. How is it that your application is not in violation of music copyright laws?
Well, we have very stringent copyright takedown policies that follow the terms of the DMCA. I can’t say much about this issue at the moment other than that we are in discussions with all of the major record labels, and several of the independents.
You mentioned that you have an artist management feature that you are preparing to launch. When do you plan on launching the new features pertaining to bands, and what features will you be adding?
Well, artists and record label executives keep badgering me to get those features done, and I really want to get them done, but beautiful girls and warm sunny beaches are one hell of a distraction. I really want to get that stuff done in the next week or two, as it will completely change the dynamic of the application.
Are you developing everything yourself or do you have a team?
I am mostly working by myself. I’m looking at bringing in some features developed by others, but we’ll see what happens. I find that it’s easiest when I do things myself, as I can ensure that simplicity is maintained - which, honestly, is the most important concern for both myself and my users. I get emails every day thanking me for not cluttering up the application with useless stuff.
How many acquisition & partnership offers have you received? Which of the offers are worth noting?
Haha, I don’t really know, since I ignore them. I’m glad the hype over Facebook Platform is dying down, so I don’t have to read more “we’re either going to acquire you or copy your app, you decide!” emails from Silicon Valley bizdev jerks…
So you have absolutely no interest in investors or partners?
The only partners I am interested in are the content creators and facilitators - artists, record labels, artist management - people like that. I don’t care about people in the Valley, or in the technology industry. The fact that technology companies have been dictating terms of interaction with end users to content creators for the past 10 years is utterly absurd. I think that the artists and the fans need a closer connection, and that venture capitalists and technology guys ruin the opportunity to build such a thing. I really can’t say much about what’s going on, but the record labels have been utterly understanding of what I’m going through, and we are really trying to figure something out - the technology guys, on the other hand, have all tried to basically screw me over, lied to me to get information on my strategy, etc. I totally understand why the labels hate working with them!
Sounds like you are really trying to create a voice for the independent musicians. Best of luck with that! Is there anything else you would like me to mention for this post?
I have to correct you — not just independent musicians, but popular ones too. I actually think the music industry is suffering from a lack of blockbuster talent and releases that are getting people excited about the industry — and that Britney types actually result in “trickle-down” sales for everyone else. Rolling Stone magazine had a great article last month in which there were two tables — one with the top 10 albums of 2000, and one with the top 10 albums of 2006. Every single artist on the 2000 Top 10 list is still popular in mainstream media; I only knew who 2 of the Top 10 artists of 2006 were! I’m hoping that I can help figure out a solution for this exposure problem.
Increasing the exposure of new artists will truly be a challenging task. Best of luck trying to make the change. Working closely with people in the music industry will be critical and it sounds like you are already doing that. I look forward to seeing how things work out! Anything else I should mention?
The first phase of Facebook application development was all about the profile page, and putting things on there. It was sort of gimmicky and got annoying very quickly. We’re entering a second phase, where it’s all about applications with their own functionality. I hope others out there recognize this, and start making cool stuff that isn’t simply attempting to “grow virally” and advertise itself on the profile — because that era is over, done, gone.
How to Survive A Food Fight
Friday, June 29th, 2007I have had the fortune to speak with one of the most successful developers on Facebook, David Gentzel. David has personally developed over 4 applications, many of which have been extremely successful. I interviewed David to get his input on the success of many Facebook applications.
How many applications have you developed for the Facebook platform and what applications are they?
So far, I’ve developed Food Fight, Trakzor, Tag, Kudos, and a few other small ones. I was working in a small team on another project when F8 hit. At that point, I became the exploratory committee and came back with some great discoveries. Now we’re all participating in the development of new social applications and have several exciting ones in the works.
What are your best performing applications?
Food Fight is the big winner so far. Though, Trakzor took off and was growing at close to 10k users per hour, but that quickly slowed down once people understood it wasn’t a Facebook profile tracker 
Have you been able to monetize any of your applications yet?
Growth first, business model second My partners are much more business savvy than I am. I worry about getting users and they focus on monetizing them in clever ways.
How many offers have you received to get acquired?
Depressingly, only one, and it wasn’t even a real purchase offer. I only had the opportunity to move and work on someone else’s ticket reservation Facebook app. Oh well…
What challenges have you faced in developing and maintaining your applications?
Deep breath….
There was a need to get in quickly, you know…before the other 10k people finished their apps. This required cutting a lot of corners and making the right judgment calls. What products? How complete? How sophisticated? Launched in what order? Lots of mind wrenching there. The short answer was, “Keep it simple.”
Additionally, something about me doesn’t like spamming people. Yes, 2.5 million of you have gotten food thrown at you. In turn, you received a notification. But, that’s because someone, with whom you are friends with, singled you out, spent his own (not so) hard earned lunch money, and splatted you with something digitally delicious. There were no “mass invitations” sent out, nor was there dirty co-registration. The only time anyone received anything was on a one-to-one basis where there was direct and personal meaning attached to the message. Others’ applications…not so much.
It’s pretty easy to spread something when all the app does is send out 100 messages to your other friends telling them something that isn’t totally true in order to get them to install the application and send out 100 more messages. Facebook finally caught on and because this functionality was abused, it was basically turned off for everyone, but only after the big guys amassed millions of users and secured a stronghold over facebook app land.
Now, there are application beasts and a lot of soon-to-be prey. That’s not to say that the big guys don’t deserve a lot for what they’ve done. Spam or not, they got millions of users to install applications, and unless those same users uninstall them, then that speaks for itself. And, frankly, it wasn’t as if they circumvented Facebook’s rules or were breaking the law. My jaw dropped at the F8 convention as Zuckerberg went through spam tool, after spam tool, after spam tool….all available to anyone. But, now, the fact that many, if not most, of the applications that are coming out would have been 100k user successes if they launched day one and had reasonable access to these tools seems pretty unruly. Being big is generally enough to win. Being big and being pre-selected to feast on the richest means of social distribution ever provided, which now allows them to feast on the ideas of the poppers, or the poppers themselves, seems borderline cruel on the part of facebook.
So, while this isn’t a “I had to load balance a few servers” problem, this is far and away the biggest issue every developer will face trying to compete inside facebook.
What future plans do you have for developing on the Facebook platform?
Our team will continue to pursue new and innovative facebook applications as long as it makes sense to do so. Social flaws aside, it’s an amazing technical platform and is truly a huge step in the realm of social networks….errr….social graphs.
Lessons From A Successful Facebook Application Team
Thursday, June 28th, 2007
This morning I had the fortune to speak with Tim Suzman, one of the developers of the immensely popular Graffiti application. Graffiti allows users to draw images and post them on your profile. While many people have posted less mature images, there are some amazing works that have been done. I have posted a couple of them at the end of this post. Be sure to check them out! Tim is a graduate of Brandeis university and is working on developing Facebook applications full-time with his team.
You have the 4th most popular application on Facebook with almost 4 million users as of today. Did you expect the application to be such a big hit?
We knew there was huge potential as soon as we saw the platform, though we obviously didn’t fully know what to expect… but once we launched a few days later, we could see almost immediately what was going to happen. Only grew to 40 users or so on the first day I think, but it was completely viral.
I see that there two other developers listed: Ted (who I’m assuming is your brother) and Mark Kantor. Are all 3 of you developers?
Yeah Ted is my brother. The three of us have been working together for several years. Ted and I do development, Mark does tons of other stuff, it works out great.
What challenges did you face in launching the Graffiti application?
I think we stayed up for three days straight without a minute of sleep And then we’d never scaled anything before past a single shared server. It was pretty wild trying to keep up, though magically Ted somehow knew what he was doing.
Your hard work is obviously paying off. How many offers have you received from others to be acquired or partner?
Maybe 6? Yeah about 6.
Any wild offers?
A couple were quite serious… but we’re not in a big hurry to get rid of this thing. Like I said earlier we’ve been working together for several years, and now that we’ve got a kind of hit, it’s really fun.
Have you come up with any effective ways of monetizing the application?
We haven’t had time to experiment much, but we threw a few ads on there which works out well enough.
There are thousands of developers and entrepreneurs that are working hard to duplicate your success. What advice would you provide to them?
The viral growth has slowed down compared to what we saw in the first couple of weeks, but there’s still a huge opportunity for new Facebook applications. I think we’re going to see some really great things in the coming weeks, and there’s room for those to grow. Some people have expressed concern that there’s a kind of unfair feedback loop — the most popular applications show up on the “recently popular list” and the “most users list” in the directory, and thus get a lot more exposure. But from what we can tell, most of our new users are not coming from the directory at all, so I don’t think it really matters that much. Just focus on making something awesome that takes advantage of the benefits of the Facebook platform.
Do you and your team have any other applications in the pipeline?
Yep.
Is there anything else that you would like to have mentioned on AllFacebook?
Some of the graffiti people have drawn has been incredible… several people have reported spending over 15 hours on a single piece. We’re working now on making a kind of public Gallery feature that people can submit their graffiti to for everyone to see. That’s our next step for Graffiti. Also, we are looking for an awesome developer who likes the startup environment.
Below are a couple drawings completed on the Graffiti application by Jeff Cattie:
