Facebook Developer Garage Seattle

Mohit, Tosh, and I attended the Facebook Developer Garage meeting tonight. It's amazing how much buzz has been created around building Facebook applications. Seattle-based iLike is one of the biggest applications on Facebook. The meeting was organized by Adam Loving, who has built a social currency application called Zuckerbucks. About 150 of us were packed into the Capital Hill Arts Center (fire code violation?). Facebook sent four representatives us to Seattle to meet with us. Presenting were Dave Morin and Meagan Marks (user id=7051). Some of the tidbits they tossed out at the meeting:

• Facebook is now at 33 million active users, adding 100,000 users PER DAY and generates 80 million page views PER DAY.
• The largest 3rd party Facebook application has 10 million users (30% penetration!) - iLike?
• There are 80,000 developers signed up to build applications (there are currently 2,200 active applications on Facebook).
• By the end of the year, they project 75% of the user base will be out of college (they just passed the 50% mark).

We're, of course, looking at creating a version of Blue Dot for Facebook. It would be great to offer the Blue Dot features (tagging, searching, aggregated view of friends Dots, Buzz) to Facebook users since they would get all the benefits of having a pre-built community of friends, without having to recreate that just to use Blue Dot. We still have some technical details to work out; in particular, we'd like NOT to partition the community into Facebook vs. Blue Dot Classic user pools. But Facebook's terms of service do not permit exposing a user's friends outside of the Facebook application. So, it may require that users do some sort of dual account creation; which would not be great. We certainly want to be able to import any current Blue Dot user's dots into their Facebook application. If you're on Facebook now, you can actually use the feed feature of the Notes application to expose Dots in your mini-feed on your profile. Join our Blue Dot Users on Facebook group to find out more (and let us know you're there).