We developers love it when people use our applications on social networks, but sometimes it can go a little too far, one of my friend’s profile looks something like this:
Archive for the 'Facebook' Category
I had talked about Facebook coming up with their integrated IM client soon. Here is a video preview of what it might look like. This is official, but they’ve said that the final product might be very different.
This is the third consecutive year that one of my websites has been hosted with Dreamhost. Despite reading a lot of negative comments about Dreamhost, my experience with them has been positive overall, so I decided to hang in there for a third year, but this year has been anything but happy, and with the last outage of the Blingy cluster, I almost signed up for MediaTemple that same day, and probably would have, has I not read some comments about their basic (gs) package having huge latency issues and other problems.
The next day Dreamhost looked like it was seeking revenge, churning out pages faster than I’d seen it do in months, but good things are never meant to last, Dreamhost is so slow today that even the Visual editor for Wordpress isn’t able to work properly. Come June, I’m anticipating some serious traffic, and at this rate, Dreamhost just wont cope (hell, it cant even cope with a Facebook application with just 115 daily active users right now), so I’m going to the pros. I see two low-cost options stacked up - MediaTemple and SliceHost. SliceHost gives root access on their $20 a month VPS while MediaTemple uses a grid service that is somewhat better than shared services but reportedly not as good VPS, no matter what their marketing hoopla says, but they are trying to correct it with their upcoming (cs) package, which I might consider if its out in time.
InsideFacebook points out that chat for Facebook is coming out in two weeks from now.
Peter Deng, Product Manager, Facebook Chat
- Facebook chat launching in the coming weeks. We’re opening up a new communication channel and enable real time conversation on the site.
- Chat UI at the bottom of the browser - present whenever you’re on the site. Shows open chat windows, number of friends online.
- Can pop out entire chat interface into a separate window. It shows online friend lists and current conversations.
- If don’t want to be bothered by chats, you can toggle your online/offline status easily.
- Considering whether or not we will support Jabber. We’re starting with on-site messaging.
- You can clear your own chat history if you like.
- Your “online” status icons when you appear throughout the site.
When Facebook first talked about a chat platform, I had hoped for something similar to Meebo, which would integrate with existing chat protocols, but it looks like Facebook is going their own way, which would have been the rational prediction in the first place.
I, for one am betting on it, when I released my Indian Premier League application, I did so on Facebook, not on Orkut, India’s leading social network which has its application platform coming out soon, and the reasons were manifold:
Firstly, while Orkut remains the social networking of choice for India, people are gradually moving towards Facebook. A year ago, Orkut was in the news for some controversies (which I shall not be talking about here), and people jumped on to see what it was all about. Wannabe networks like iBiBo jumped in with active TV and Radio advertising, with “enchanced” features that were basically “inspired” by Facebook. Now that people are finding out what the world uses, they’re jumping ship to Facebook.
Perhaps most importantly, Facebook was easier to develop for, plain and simple. Facebook provides a host of features, and by far the simplest integration with their system and interface. Moreover, Orkut’s platform is to go public in April, but its having trouble. Considering that the IPL kicks off on April 18, I ran the risk of working hard and creating an app that might never see the light in time.
People already know about Facebook apps, it’ll take some time for people to realize the potential of the Orkut platform when it finally happens, that said, those first to the platform can make huge gains, but the risk was not worth it for me, considering my app has a two month peak window.
Continuing with the Indian Premier League application I built for Facebook, some people were giving me feedback that it was a little too large and complicated, so I got to work and built an extraction, well, eight extractions to be exact - an app for each IPL team!
Looks cool? That’s what you get to flaunt on your profile, plus there’s the usual features that were extracted from the mail IPL application.
As of now, only two are active - Kolkata Knight Riders and Deccan Chargers, because those were the only teams for which I could get the anthems for now. Here’s a preview of some of the features:
I just finished working on the first public release for the Indian Premier League Facebook application, been a lot of work, but it definitely worked out quicker than the April 6 deadline I set myself, and with a lot more features too. Continue to expect some tweaks and feature upgrades, and here’s a picture, click on it to go to the application info page from where you can install the application:
So here I am, hard at work developing the first real Ideative Flux application for Facebook, called “Indian Premier League.” Its designed for Cricket fans on Facebook who wish to follow the Indian Premier League, and it has lots of features already. Here’s a little preview of what’s in store:
Some basic information on the features:
News: The news is collected from over 4500 different sources using Google’s algorithms, so if there’s anything about the IPL on the internet, you’ll get it here!
Videos: Videos are stored on YouTube, MetaCafe, etc. but they’re all linked to our own internal database, so you’ll get the latest IPL content with no nonsense.
League Table: This is a no-nonsense league table updated with the latest in the IPL.
Leaderboard: This is the leaderboard for the fantasy IPL Selector game.
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