I will be giving a presentation at the Weekend Apps [http://blog.weekendapps.com/about/] event on February 22nd. This event, which will take place over the course of 3 days, will bring together some very bright minds to build a number of [what I hope to be] excellent Facebook Applications. Weekend Apps takes cues from the very successful Stanford Facebook Course. At Weekend Apps, a fairly large group of people will be broken up into smaller groups, where group members will contribute to the final product - a compelling, engaging, and viral Facebook Application. I personally hope the groups will focus on the first two attributes, as virality can be built for any application. It is possible to ‘teach’ the integration of viral features and viral flows into Facebook Apps (as demonstrated by the Stanford course), but *much* harder to teach the other two.
Weekend Apps has quite an impressive list of speakers [I don’t find myself too impressive - but I am on the list too]:
Presentations:
- Facebook Platform and Applications, by Dave Morin from Facebook.
- Incorporating your startup, and other legal details, by Chris Field from Orrick.
- Going from Zero to 1 Million Page Views in One Month, by Siqi Chen (App: Friends for Sale).
- How I reached 5M installs, Nicolas Kokkalis (App: Who’s your perfect match)
- Promoting and Monetizaing Facebook Apps, by KW Low (App: My Heros Abilities).
- Flex on Facebook: Flex Apps on FB Platform, by Alex Notov, founder Shockapps, and editor at Startupism.
I expect some really excellent pointers from Chris Field and a very exciting presentation from my friend and advisor Siqi Chen [he wrote an excellent series of articles on this blog some time ago about what works on Facebook - judging from the rampant success of Friends For Sale, he knows a thing or two]. Nicolas will likely focus on virality. KW Low’s presentation should be pretty good as well. I am always a fan of hearing opinions on monetization of apps - and have some of my own. In my own presentation, I will focus on the benefits of using Flex, Flash, and AS3 to create highly compelling GUIs for Facebook apps, and web apps in general - in half the time, with no browser worries, with high code reusability, stunning visual effects, and other benefits not *easily* found in HTML/JS/CSS. If you are a JAVA hacker[I never was - but so I heard], this will probably be right up your alley.
Anyway - enough self promotion… instead I would like to thank Adobe [sponsor at Weekend Apps], the brilliant team at Adobe Labs (with whom I had the pleasure of working to build Kuler), and all the people involved in Adobe products, who are responsible for making coding, design, and all facets of web application production phun. Adobe was and will be on the cutting edge in the years to come. Having worked with the guys and gals at Labs - I can tell you that first hand.
In closing, I’d like to plug the fact that tickets for Weekend Apps are free for a limited time [til 02/18]: http://weekendapps.eventbrite.com/?discount=FBAPPS
