Prateek Dayal

Deepan has started a Facebook Developers Meetup Group and the first meet is happening on 7th March 2010. You can find the details on upcoming.

I will be giving a presentation on basics of Facebook Connect and a small tutorial on developing a simple application using FB Connect. This is the same talk that I gave earlier in ACM’s compute event. However, unlike the ACM event, this event is free to attend.

See you there!

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I tried importing my gmail address book into Facebook today using their friend finder and it showed me about 500 contacts that I can add as friends. I scanned the whole list and selected contacts that I know well and hit the invite button. In the summary, I was shown about thousand extra contacts (including some mailing lists, some old university addresses) that the invitation were sent to. I got some 5 invitations myself, sent to different email aliases I have. I don’t even remember seeing those email addresses (including my own aliases) in the list of contacts shown to me.

I wonder why a company like Facebook has such a misleading invitation mechanism. When Facebook says that you have X contacts that you can add as friend and shows their photo next to their names, anyone would assume that these are people already on Facebook. Turns out a lot of these people are not on Facebook and there is no separate list of contacts who are not on FB, but can be invited (which is a common two step invitation practice followed by sites like Twitter/LinkedIn etc).

If you have received an invite to join Facebook from me, please accept my apologies and ignore it. I did not mean to send even a single invite. I have never even invited all my contacts to Muziboo, my own startup so I particularly hate being labeled as a spammer when FB spams on my behalf.  Thanks so much FB for breaching my trust!

Popularity: 32% [?]

Internet Revolution has a great post on Google and its top 10 failures. Opensocial is listed at number 4 and I cannot agree more. With all the hoopla around the launch, it took orkut about 7 months to launch opensocial applications and even if we ignore for a minute the fact that developing on orkut is a nightmare, the app selection process is a complete mystery and a total turn off.

We worked on an opensocial application that allows user to add music to their orkut profile. This is ofcourse music they have uploaded on Muziboo or music they have marked as favorite on Muziboo. We worked on this application not just because we must have a presence on orkut and facebook but for two reasons

• Most of our users have presence on orkut and this feature had been requested before
• A lot of muziboo users add muziboo as their webpage in orkut and post muziboo links in their profile and community threads in orkut. Below is a screenshot showing that

The above led us to believe that we can add a lot of value to our users by enabling them to showcase their music on their orkut profile. We therefore went ahead and created a simple application where we can link up your muziboo account and application and your music and favorites start showing up on your profile page.

We tested the app for xss and cross browser functionality and submitted to orkut. There was no email confirming that the app has been submitted nor any link to track the approval process. After a week or 10 days, we got an email from orkut saying that our app has been rejected. The reason cited was that they are looking at more interactive apps like ilike app that let you do more.

Here is my question to the orkut and opensocial team. Who decides the value of the application? Is it the developers, the orkut team or the end user? If its the end user, then there is already enough evidence that this is something a lot of people will benefit from. Compare this to facebook where even the most basic apps are accepted if they work. I for example have picasa and flickr app on my profile that just displays my picasaweb and flickr images on my profile. They do nothing else and I don’t want them to do anything else and facebook does not interfere.

I think in orkut unless you crap on and slap your friends, the apps are not interactive and useful enough. I think they should really look into making the platform more democratic and letting users pick what they want.

Popularity: 12% [?]