Faithbuk Debellypur Garah..? Huh?

Huge thanks to Toby Beresford and Techlightenment for organising and sponsoring the Facebook Developer Garage at the T Bar tonight, at which Jonny and I gave a five minute presentation.

Despite the tremendously bad acoustics, we were very grateful for the chance to get in front of a fairly large audience and holler about Mesh! It also gave us an opportunity to discuss potential Facebook applications which we hope to be able to employ to drive traffic to our site and spark interest in non-members. One very interesting guy mentioned an idea involving the sale of unique art on Facebook, or the rating of art amongst the Facebook audience. Both are ideas we will be looking into further when we come out of beta.

We were also fortunate to see the showcase of a new application built for Facebook called, "Socialistics". Developed initially by Ankur Shah of Techlightenment, it is currently a little ropey round the edges, but it promises great things in the realm of social analysis.

The My Stats link basically breaks down a user's core information as available on Facebook and displays it in a very accessible fashion. The developers, however, think that the real potential is in its predictive quality, in others words that by combining various bits of data you can start really understanding people and their relationships.



The My Clouds link shows your friends' relationships to you - their level of connectivity to you within your network or how many people they know that you also know, so in essence their popularity within the network. The Proximity Cloud takes that a step further and starts to assess your relationship in terms of events and groups shared.



The next Facebook Developer Garage is on 12 September 2007 and Toby promises that the Facebook team (who we linked to by live video conference - albeit again through muffled acoustics) will be flying over the pond to come and see us in the flesh. Next time, we're sure a better venue and the actual presence of real human beings from the Facebook Enterprise will stun attendees into a respectful and humble silence, so that everyone will be able to benefit from messages from the mother ship.