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 […]

Who remembers Doom? Now, who remembers the reasons that Doom was so revolutionary from a technology perspective? One of the most important advances that John Carmack made with Doom was that it was the first game to incorporate Binary Space Partitioning (BSP), a concept that had been explored in the context of computer […]

I’ll admit it - I love reading Valleywag. It’s a great cynical counter to TechCrunch, as well as to countless tech beat writers who parrot press releases and are baffled when high-flying and well-funded companies fail. This is also the domain of Uncov, which is pretty funny as well but doesn’t post nearly […]

Two weeks ago, me, my two partners in crime Aaron Nemoyten and Jessica Mah launched our first official Facebook application: Serial Killer. Suffice it to say that this application is the answer and ultimate de-facto shove in the face to all the other poke apps on Facebook. Before you get all offended […]

Now that we actually have something to show off which demonstrates that we kind of know what we’re doing, Alex and I have decided to get back into the habit of attending meetups.

Meetups are strange beasts. A bunch of people, bound by a broad common interest, lack of other social outlets and/or real industry […]

As a web site based around one feature and one feature only, Digg is not a product. Digg is a feature.The underlying question is, how easy is it to implement this functionality into another web site? And I think, in the case of Digg, the answer is “very easy.” Couple this with their total inability to “cross the chasm,” so to speak, and you have a perfect recipe for a web site that models what could become a very popular feature… in other web sites.

…If apps need to try so hard to spread themselves based on the “Ideavirus” model, why take it so literally? It seems like the model here is the common cold, spread almost uncontrollably… and nobody really needs it. Whatever happened to confidence in product?

While reading the blog of Scott Heiferman (co-founder of Meetup.com), I noticed a trackback to Marc Andreessen’s blog. Marc, in turn passed this quote on from Glenn Kelman, CEO of Redfin, who wrote on the blog of Guy Kawasaki. Anyway, now that all the introductions and credits are out of the way, I […]

This is part II of a series.
What kinds of apps are working on Facebook, and what can we learn from them as developers and designers? How do we even define success on Facebook applications? Installs? Active users? Canvas page views? Churn rate? Let’s see.
Let’s begin by taking a look at the Appaholic Viral Dashboard. Over […]

Hey guys. I’m Siqi, and I’m your guest blogger today. Alex Notov invited me to write a little about the Facebook platform. Since I have over zero users in the three weeks since I launched my own app, I am eminently qualified to pontificate on why you too need to have a Facebook app this […]