Adam Loving’s BlogSeattle Facebook, OpenSocial, and Web Development

It’s Thursday and the team has just one day remaining to complete their project for “A Startup A Week”. The concept of the show is to bring together a few rockstar developers and designers, pitch them an idea for a startup, and give them just one week to take the idea from concept to reality.

For the initial project of this series, our team is building out a Facebook application that can use the viral power of the social graph to raise money for a computer lab in Cambodia via the non-profit Room to Read. On this episode, our developer Adam Loving shows how he used LINQ and SQL Server to keep track of donations, our designer Jay Dokken of Design Commission gives us a very quick sneak preview of his awesome design, and Kyle Cressman sits down with our special guest Dominic Canterbury from D/C Strategic.

With less than 48 hours remaining, can our team come together and create a startup in a week? Stay tuned for the finale tomorrow, and be sure to check out the first three days of A Startup A Week - Episode One.

Last December, I was lucky enough to present on a panel at a Web Community Forum conference about marketing on Facebook. I just discovered some of my notes from that event that I never published.

• A Facebook sponsored group costs $100K/month
• Jeremiah Owyang coined the term “Microburst Entertainment” to refer to the increasingly distributed nature of Web content (and functionality).
• Jason Beckerman recommended Include a dynamic element on your canvas home page (like the countdown timer in The Lotto app).
• With The Lotto app, they had success with requiring users to invite in order to receive a lotto ticket. Update: in the last few months, I’ve had success with forced invites as well, I should blog in more detail about this.
• Be Santa app - better success with Amazon referrals once they included a separate add unit. Update: I tried a new Amazon ad unit in my Toy Chest app and saw no improvement.
• General social tip from either Mari Smith or Teresa Valdez Klein: use friend’s walls to congratulate them publicly.
• Teresa Valdez Klein suggested using Google Reader to aggregate and re-publish your own feeds. Update: I’m now using this technique on this blog (see How This Blog Works).
• Todd Sawicki suggested that tagging people in photos will rank high in the newsfeed. Update: I considered hacking this technique for my Hot Photos app. I was going to tag people as “Hot” or “Funny” but shied away from it after seeing warnings from Facebook in the developer forums.
• Also, watch your minifeed as an indication of how you appear to others
• Steve Broback demoed an interesting sentiment tracker (Google alerts that track positive/negative feedback).
• Brand marketers need a mechanism to aggregate groups of people by brand. Pages and Groups are not perfect tools. A common complaint is group messaging (from Pages, Groups, or Events)
• Dave McClure described designing apps to amplify the news feed “inductive loop” (see Andrew Chen’s blog).
• Dave McClure demoed the technique of using an image of a button in a newsfeed. Update: very good idea, I borrowed that for my Hot Photos app.
• Dave McClure said that one of the Stanford Facebook apps is projected to earn $1M this year. Update: would be interesting to go back and check this out. I’m not sure what app he was refering to, but I know “Send Hotness” has had a real decline in users.
• Mari Smith suggested outsourcing community admin work - start with deleting spam from Facebook groups
• Lee Lorenzen described his mission as looking for office apps for the social graph.
• To justify Facebook’s valuation, Lee Lorenzen listed a slew of present and prospective licensing and partnership deals. It was an interesting list that could be re-interpreted as ideas for building businesses on Facebook.