SNAP Summit
Ever since Facebook opened their platform,
there is a new creed of social networking applications that seem to be
generating usage numbers that were once thought possible for only Google to
muster. Suddenly, in a matter of mere months, RockYou
and Slide are
becoming household names.
The Facebook platform was the topic of discussion at a day long summit
at the Yerba Buena Center in San Francisco on Friday, October 26th. I
was one of the 320 paid attendees. The first session was a panel on
designing for Virality featuring, among others, RockYou CTO Jia Chen.
There were'nt any revelations as such. The panelists concurred that it
is important to track granular details from the beginning. The first
10-20 clicks that a user makes will determine if the application will
be viral. They recommended to perform A/B testing
once you have the analytics.
Ami Vora of Facebook gave a "State of the Platform" address. Apparently
Facebook generates 60 billion pageviews per month - that implies 50
pages/day/user. Given that I don't even come close to that on my
Facebook profile, there must be people who view a lot more that 50
pages/day! There are over 5,400 Facebook applications. Facebook has
given 88,000 developer keys. Ami said that she attributes the success
of the Facebook platform to three properties:
Mass Distribution - viral distribution enabled
through Facebook's social graph
Deep Integration into Facebook - enabling the
same access as Facebook applications
New business opportunity - through growth and
engagement
Mark Mayo of Joyent spoke about
scaling Facebook applications. He spoke of the phenomenal success of
the "Are
You Normal" (you need a Facebook account to view this link)
application. This application (from Kizin)
is adding 50,000 users/day and is completely hosted by Joyent. He
talked about Vertical Scalability (maintain all state in the database)
vs Horizontal Scalability. His advise was
to watch Database transactions very closely for
slow queries
memcache everything
run memcached for every App Server instance
This was followed by a few panels on The Future of Social
Network Advertising, a Blogger Roundtable moderated by Robert Scoble
(who claimed to have 5,000 friends on Facebook!) and Platform
strategies that work.
For me networking with like minded people was extremely valuable.
I collected over 20 business cards and promised to get back in
touch with them soon.
Sunday Oct 28, 2007
