Conference with Dave Mc Glure from Stanford

Two days ago, I want with a couple friends to a great conference in Edinburgh University. The theme was "Web 2.0 and the Facebook Phenomenon". The speaker, Dave Mc Clure, came the University of Stanford, USA (no needs to remind that the creators of Google studied there). He is currently teaching a class about the creation of Facebook Applications and how to make them popular. Apart from that he has been doing many things in the Silicon Valley for the last 15 years (investment, consulting, etc... ) In particular, Dave launched SimplyHired.com and worked at PayPal. He is also as "geek" as he likes to call himself.

I found this conference very interresting. It was targeted on the web 2.0 services, how they are important and how to make profits from them.

Here is some points that I think have to be remember:

1. The developers have to pay more attention to the online metrics. The ability to measure customer feedbacks in real time is essential. The different features of an application or website haven't to be measured and analyzed separately in order to see what works or not but also how and why.
   
   
2. Emailing can be a good way to keep users and make them visiting regularly your website. Of course this has to stay reasonable and not spammy. A link allowing the users to unsubscribe to the mail list should be include in the mail.
   
   
3. There is different steps to take into account for the good success of a website:
   - The first impression is essential: it will be the determinant factor for the user to come back or not.
   - At the second step, you have to make them addicted, you have to create an interest for them to come back regularly.
   - etc...
   
   
4. About Facebook: The fact that when a user adds an application to his profile it gives you the list of his friends is a very powerful idea! For Dave, "it is maybe the greatest thing that happened on the internet for the last ten years". Of course this has to be use with respect of the privacy of everyone and not for spammy purposes. However, it is a very powerful way for a service to grow up and this is something Facebook done very well.
   
   
5. Google has a very good way to monetize its services but no social network (apart YouTube)
   Facebook has a huge network of users but a very crappy monetization of its services.
   => Both have to work on way to change the situation.
   
   
6. In summary, strengths or Facebook:
   - The social graph = Friend lists
   - Shared social activity stream = Feeds
   - Social Platform & API = Apps
   

How to improve the interface?

A very important thing for an application, whatever the purpose is, consists of being easily understandable and usable for the users. Therefore, the design of the interface is something essential. The developers have to keep that in mind because it will make the success of an application as much as the number of features that the application has.

On issue for my application is to make the understanding of the rides very clear. The rides have to be display in some way that make their management and their reading very easy and intuitive.

Here is my solution so far:


Ok, so let me explain how it works here. I use two notions: the notion of Ride and the notion of Trip. Basically, a Ride contains several Trips. A Rides belong to the sentence "Every monday and tuesday I go to Glasgow". The Trip is the fact that this monday (as each monday) I'll go to Glasgow. So the creation of a Ride will imply the creation of several Trips.

In the calendar, the Rides and Trips are represent in blue. It is quite straight forward to see when the user does commute. However this is probably not always the same commute that is done. It is probable that sometime the user doesn't go to the same destination and it would be nice that this notion appears some how in the view. This is the problem, how is that possible to include it here in an efficient way?

One solution that has been considered was to include a abbreviation of the destination into each cell of the calendar... This is obviously impratical and not easily readable.

Another solution would be to differentiate the different Rides by using colors. This would be reinforced by the include of a legend with the name of the destination at the top of the calendars. This is a tricky code to write... but I'll work on it now :)

[EDIT]

Job done: here is the result.


I think it is quite a good way to solve this problem. We will see what my supervisor think about it.

The next steps

Here are the features of my application that are available:

• Add a ride (start address, end address, time, frequency, preferences, ...)
• View of differents trips scheduled in a calendar
• Delete a trip from the calendar

These features are a good start for the application but much more have to be done:

• Controls of the data got from the "add a ride" formulars
• Make a difference between the different rides in the calendar by using colors
• Implement the editing of one (or many) trips from the calendar interface
• Create a view to display details of a ride to the other user +
  
• Implement a search engine for the rides
• Create the home page with the differents rides available around the city of the user displayed on a map

Going further...

Here is a little explanation about this project of carpooling application using the Facebook API.
What does the application consist on? What is the interest? Why did I choose Facebook? This some of the question I am answering in this video. Sorry for the grammar mistakes...

Mark Zuckerberg on CBS

There is something I wanted to talk about yesterday when hear about it but I didn't have time to spend on writing so I take some time today to do so.
On Saturday, the channel CBS diffused an interview of the creator of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, and a short presentation of the social network during the 60 min'. The anchorwoman Lesley Stahl made a pretty interesting overview of different functionalities and aim of Facebook. The presentation was of course not exhaustive especially concerning the question of the applications, subject that are interesting use more particularly. The interest of this video was more to introduce Facebook for those that do not hear about it yet.
However it is very interesting to see the interview of this incredibly young company manager and especially the maturity that he proves with his ability to manage the huge success of his company. As a young student in computer science, I have to admit that I am totally fan of this guy and that my dream would be to create a product that meet a comparable success!
The essential announcement: "I think what I can announce is that it is highly unlikely that we will go public in 2008," Zuckerberg says. This stage will come in 2 or 3 years thinks Zuckerberg. We will see... a lot of things have to be done first!

Facebook on 60 Minutes 01-13-08 (Part 1)


Facebook on 60 Minutes 01-13-08 (Part 2)