We are happy to have Bawls as the official energy drink for the upcoming Facebook Developer Garage NEPA. The kind folks at Bawls are sending up free cases of their hyper-caffeinated, guarana-flavored drinks. Come out to demo Bawl’s brand new guarana-infused root beer called “G33k B33r”! We will also be giving away free bottles of Bawls Guarana, G33k B33r, and other cool Bawls swag at the event.

A forum to share ideas with local developers, look for partners on your latest project, see and participate in Facebook App demonstrations, seek technical support, or just network and socialize with other developers interested in the Facebook Platform. Or viral growth, tricks for testing your app, metrics for success, ninja code tricks…the usual.

So far, the list of confirmed speakers are:

• Kristopher Jones, CEO, Pepperjam
• Jay Signorello, Software engineer, Heavy.com
• Ray Steigerwalt, Software developer, Meezik
• Jim Walker, Software developer, Meezik
• Daehee Park, Marketing & sales coordinator, Meezik

The following topics will be discussed:

• Facebook’s f8 vs Google’s OpenSocial developer platforms
• Development
• Scaling
• Monetizing with ad networks and affiliate offers
• Viral marketing techniques

We encourage not only developers but also entrepreneurs and marketers to come out to check out this exciting new platform to monetize. Also, information technology, computer science, and business majors at the regional colleges should attend to learn more about how to create Facebook applications. You don’t need a programming background to attend, because we are going to talk about Facebook applications from the ground-up.

The admission is free. Remember, the location is at the Pepperplex located at:

The Innovation Center
7 South Main Street, Floor 3
Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania 18701

Check out the Facebook Event page for the Garage and RSVP today!

Plus, development and hosting costs aside, a Facebook application is essentially a free advertisement. Compare a couple thousand dollars for paying a Facebook developer to what these movie companies have to pay for a 30-second commercial on television that is really a hit or miss.

Here are newest movie applications from big companies like 20th Century Fox and Sony Pictures.

Rambo (Sony Pictures)

The Rambo application lets you attack your friends (all in fun). Decimate them with a chainsaw or shoot a bazooka over their way. Yes, this application is just as demented and gory as the movie.

You gain points by mindlessly attacking everyone on your friends list, and you can eventually “become Rambo” if you accumulate enough points. This application is short, sweet, and to the point: Go see Rambo to see some crazy action.

Check out Become Rambo

The Bucket List (Warner Bros. Pictures)

The Bucket List application is actually a useful one that can last on people’s profiles longer than the time this movie is in theaters. You create a “Bucket List” of things you want to do in life, and this list is displayed on your profile in a cute notebook-style box. The nice social touch is matching up the items in your Bucket List with your friends’ to see if you have similar goals.

For some reason, though, I don’t know how well targeted this application is for Facebook users. The Bucket List is a list of things you want to do before you die. Are many college students really pondering this deep, serious issue about life?

Check out The Bucket List.

Jumper (20th Century Fox)

Jumper is a slick but extremely useless application. It feels like the developers behind this application stopped short of finishing the application because Fox refused to pay up the rest of the money. The Jumper application makes use of flash effects and dynamic text replacement. You can “jump” (teleport) your friends into various spots on the world map, which then displays a slick animation of you teleporting to that location and generates a “(insert name) was here” type message.

Check out Jumper

It will be interesting to see how big companies embrace the social networking platforms to promote their products. The current companies doing it are still early adopters and have not optimized their campaigns. Creating social applications could very soon become a standard advertising method, just as pay-per-click advertising quickly became a necessity for many businesses.

The Greater Valley Technology Alliance is a technology-based economy advocate group in Northeastern Pennsylvania. From their mission statement,

The GVTA’s mission is the creation of a self-sustaining technology-based economy in Northeastern Pennsylvania. Its aim is to stimulate the creation of the necessary infrastructure to support the growth of such an economy, including venture capital, research centers, technical education, entrepreneurship, recreation and lifestyle amenities, and the attraction and retention of human capital.

We are competing not only for the money but for exposure to the business community in our region and for the likelihood of improving Meezik’s initial business plan by refining it for the competition. Also, it would be an honor to compete against other entrepreneurs in the Northeastern Pennsylvania area. This event is a respectable effort to improve the tech economy of our region with young people with new ideas.

We have a strong chance of winning this competition because 1) our company works in the innovative field of social media, 2) we utilize all the new hyped-up web technologies, 3) we have a clearly defined profit model, 4) we have a powerful team that can achieve goals wherever we set them, and 5) I am putting my best effort into preparing the best damn business plan seen since this competition’s inception.

What will we do if we win this year’s GVTA Business Plan Competition? We’ll put the startup money to good use mostly for advertising costs, and then we’ll continue with our business as usual but with a slick badge on our company website that says “Winner of the 2008 GVTA Business Plan Competition.” Wish us luck!

I went grocery shopping alone yesterday, and, with no one around to question my choices, I bought a generic store brand of apple juice instead of the usual Mott’s that we buy.

The ingredients are the same: water, apples, and ascorbic acid. So it would taste the same too, right?

At first sip I realized I was wrong. Whereas the Mott’s apple juice is refreshing, the generic apple juice tasted like it was squeezed from old, browned apples, and it had a dark, stenchy kick to it.

The difference is in the origin of the apples. The apples in the generic juice are imported from China.

So what’s the point of this blog post, and what do apples have to do with social applications?

You can hire programmers who can make you Facebook applications for very cheap. I’ll point you in the direction if you’re interested. I see customers inquiring on the forums all the time offering $100 for what is supposedly a “really simple app,” so I know the demand is present.

The resulting application from this cheap work will be like the generic apple juice described above. First, it will look plain and mediocre. Just another faceless social application out there that is saturating the marketplace and no one wants to use. If you want to see an application that is the antithesis of generic, check out our recent Facebook application called Crushmail. You will notice a big difference in the user interface.

Second, the application may look just “normal” on the outside, but it will be buggy and lack a lot of features that make up a good user experience. One of our company’s highlights is that we act as a creative agent for our clients.

When you present an application idea to us to promote your company, product, whatever, we don’t blindly go ahead and develop an application for you. Rather, we think of ways to integrate your idea with other features so that it is useful, attractive, and more likely to become a viral application. We had a recent client who wanted an application that was simply a registration form for the client’s website. But we refused to create a failure and, instead, improvised with the client’s idea and created a viral application that users would want to add. Meanwhile, the registration form for the client’s website is presented after reeling in the users with much more attractive features.

So don’t go with the cheap developers. Really, you get what you pay for and you will regret it. In the future, I will post a list of other social application developers who offer high quality development services like we do, so take your business to companies like ours and fuel the social economy with the good stuff.

We should be pickier about what projects we take on and who we hire. By choosing only the best deals, we could make much more money than if we did them all. And this benefits our clients because they know that we are concentrating on developing their applications close to their maximum potential.

Our goal isn’t volume. By working hard to line up innovative projects one after another, we can increase our chances of getting more great high-paying projects in the future.

What do you think are the signs of success for a company? Is it sprouting a long-long list of clients and having the fastest growing workforce in the industry? Or, like we are trying to do at Meezik, is it having a tight portfolio of high-quality, successful projects?

What makes us different from other social app developers? Meezik is one of the few social application development companies that 1) isn’t a one-man operation, 2) is not an outsourced development company outside of the US, and 3) takes pride in not just the quantity of applications that we put out but also the quality.

The Problem with One Man Operations

One opinion, tunnel vision development, stretched timeline. Need I say more?

There are talented solo programmers out there, and sure they can get the job done for you. Believe me, our developers would each do very well on their own as freelancers. But there’s nothing as powerful as teamwork with synergy.

We each have strengths and weaknesses. And busting your butt to learn a bit about everything isn’t going to cut it in today’s world. You will never be a perfect web developer. However, you can cover your faults by forming a small team with people who are smarter than you in other areas.

We have a dedicated and harmonic team at Meezik, which is truly a blessing. We each have our specialized skills that we are really good at. And we don’t pretend that we know more, either. When we come together as a team, all the missing pieces get filled in and quality works gets done. You see applications with beautiful interfaces and amazingly efficient backends.

As we scale our company in the future, we will always maintain our belief in the power of small teams.

Why Outsourcing is Not All About Cheap Overseas Labor

The following picture sums up my feelings about outsourcing software development:

Software development, especially social application development, is not all about pumping out lines of code.

Your application must be innovative and creative enough to hit the market as a virus and sweep the ratings. Most outsourced programmers cannot offer this because they are working on a project as an hourly job rather than a source of passion and a prize for reputation.

We at Meezik have personal conversations with our clients to bounce ideas off of each other to improve the final product. We are not solely concerned about finishing the task at hand, but we care about your having a successful social application when we are finished. If we don’t think your idea has potential for popularity, we will deny your request rather than see you go away with a mediocre application.

We Take Pride in Our Work

We believe that every application that we work on is a reflection of our company reputation. Although most clients usually do not agree to let us showcase our work for them in our portfolio (for secrecy), we expect to be able to do so because we work with high standards.

I can tell you right now that another social application company will probably quote you lower prices and less number of hours to complete the job at hand. Instead of taking the “speed over quality” approach, we develop step-by-step with a solid foundation and make certain to minimize the number of annoying bugs that can show up later in the application.

We like to see that our clients return to us for repeat-business. So customer service and satisfaction are needless to say our #1 priority. Don’t take a chance with a hit-and-run programmer. Email us at sales@meezik.com for a free evaluation of your dream application.

This tutorial requires you to have:
#1 - Web space capable of hosting PHP applications.
and
#2 - Copy of the core Facebook API files (found here: http://developers.facebook.com/clientlibs/facebook-platform.tar.gz)

First step will be to extract these files on your web host (I will show the FTP method for those of you without SSH access).

Download the Facebook API to your local computer. Using either WinRAR or WinZip, extract the archive onto your Desktop.

Next, you must now upload these files into your web space directory using your favorite FTP client. If you don’t have one, I recommend FileZilla.

Ok, great! Next thing to do is open a copy of your favorite Text Editor. For Programming I personally recommend Programmers Notepad, but regular old Notepad will work too!

Once you have your text editor open, you are going to want to download a copy of the example code from here and copy/paste this into notepad.

You will need to replace the $appapikey and $appsecret variables with your app’s keys. This can be found on the Developers page.

Save the file as index.php and upload onto your web server using your FTP client (note: this should NOT be in the facebook-platform directory. This should be in the directory CONTAINING facebook-platform).

Now you can check out your creation! Simply add the application to your profile, and you’re done! (Go to the Developer screen, select your application from the menu on your right, and click Add To Profile)

For current web developers, creation of Facebook applications couldn’t be easier.

The next installment will show you how to interface Smarty PHP template engine to save you time (Which means Money!) designing re-usable user interfaces for your applications.

Until next time..

Last week, Facebook implemented an “ignore all” feature to application invitations. Application invitations were getting out of control! You may remember getting flooded with invitations to iLike, Hot or Not, and dozens of other apps that you have no interest in whatsoever. Now with a simple click of a button, you can clear them all out. This means that apps cannot depend on expanding their reach by taking the easy way and forcing their users to send out invitations to their buddies.

Then, just recently, Facebook announced a limit to the number of notifications that an app can send out. Now the valuable real estate on your Facebook front page won’t be plastered (as much) with irrelevant application updates from your friends.

This notification limit will depend on a variety of factors, but the point is that it will encourage developers to improve the quality of their applications. More relevant information and less spam! This also fattens up the barrier to entry for emerging apps because free, easy exposure on Facebook is harder to come by.

As you can see, this is a turning point. Making a Facebook application “go viral” will now take a lot more skill and planning than before.

We all had a blast with Facebook Applications 1.0. Shitty applications could go viral overnight while banner ads started being slapped on the headers and footers of every application.

The playing field has now changed for the better, and you can expect to see more complex apps that are not as easily cloneable and provide a better user experience. And more importantly, apps that truly take advantage of all the valuable personal data floating around on social networks to create rich, useful information for the user.

In order to compete, MySpace was forced to implement a Development Platform. The executive staff either overlooked this feature, or did not even bother to consider the idea. My guess is that they believe themselves to be the Giant in the field. This IS correct, but as all of us know quite well it only takes a kid in his basement or dorm room to take down the biggest of Giants.

I expect the API to be lacking features and full of bugs. This whole endeavor by MySpace reeks of impossible deadlines and shotty coding practices to pump out something, anything, just to stay alive. Too much relies on the successful launch to rush the developers. Coming from a background in Software Development, I can attest first hand that impossible deadlines create inferior code.

This may very well be the start of the end for the Giant, and a mass migration of the all so valuable asset of social media sites - the Users. The future of MySpace depends on a successful launch of it’s API, along with the support of the development community. Time will tell..