Web 2.1

Vampire post-mortum on how to create TV-scale applications

2011-09-15T20:25:00.000-07:00

Had fine time yesterday watching MTV's Deadliest Warrior on big TV screen and Loyalize's servers on my laptop screen crunching numbers from users' vote during the show. Personally, I have more passion for software then for Zombies or Vampires, so I found it to be much more fun watching my laptop screen then TV. What struck me is that just a few years back, numbers that I saw on my laptop will be if not impossible but extremely difficult to achieve. So, I am glad to report, that common (open source) technology is finally is at the level that it allows a relatively small team of good engineers to write an application that works for TV-audience scale.

What worked for us is the combination of:

Of cause, it's a lot of work to make them work together in scalable and reliable fashion but, at least, finally, we do not need to mix sand and clay to make bricks first if we want to build a house - all bricks are are readily available for download.

Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES) and PHP

2011-01-25T19:58:00.000-08:00

This morning Amazon announced availability of a bulk email delivery service called "Simple Email Service". Anyone who knows how much pain is it to set-up scalable email solution (and it is not just spammers who need it!) should celebrate the occasion. I know of a company that spent several years cleaning ip addresses it sends email and found itself locked into the contract with internet provider since it would take forever to reach required level of email deliver ability anywhere else.

Anyway, this evening I decided to check the Amazon claim that the service is "simple". Found out that it is indeed simple!
Since there is not much in terms of the documentation yet, here is my code where I used AWS PHP library:

// Enable full-blown error reporting. http://twitter.com/rasmus/status/7448448829
error_reporting(-1);

// Set plain text headers
header("Content-type: text/plain; charset=utf-8");

// Include the SDK
require_once '../sdk.class.php';


// Instantiate the Amazon class
$ses = new AmazonSES();

//what's our quota?
$rQuota = $ses->get_send_quota();
   $quota24 = (int) $rQuota->body->GetSendQuotaResult->Max24HourSend;
$sentCnt = (int) $rQuota->body->GetSendQuotaResult->SentLast24Hours;
echo("we can send max of  $quota24 per 24 hrs and we sent $sentCnt so far\n");

//verify sender email (do it once per sender!)
//$ses->verify_email_address('dispose@gmail.com');
//print_r($ses->list_verified_email_addresses());


   //send email
$source = 'dispose@gmail.com';
$destination = CFComplexType::map(array('ToAddresses'=>'x@gmail.com', 'CcAddresses'=>'x@hotmail.com'));

   $message = CFComplexType::map(array('Subject.Data'->'test email', 'Body.Text.Data'->'test message ' . rand(100, 1000)));
   $rSendEmail = $ses->send_email($source, $destination, $message);

if ($rSendEmail->status==200) {
        $emailId = $rSendEmail->body->SendEmailResult->MessageId;
        echo("sent test email with id: $emailId\n");
}
else {
   print_r($rSendEmail);
}

Lessons from Social Gaming Summit

2010-05-06T16:12:00.000-07:00

Many good presentations here. Two that are stand out of the crowd are from MyYearBook and Kontagent.

MyYearBook Ideas

Games Should Advance What Site is About
Play games within streamOpening doors for 3-rd party developers
Anyway games are popular for 6-8 mth except “platform” games
Game promotionViral channels “promotions”, a way to present apps:

Bulletin board
In-stream games
Action Items (below user profile picture)
Notifications
Profile Box (badges, etc)

Metrics for Social Games (presentation from Kontagent)
Trend Observation: From Viral Analytics early on to User Lifetime Value vs External User acquisition so Retaining engagement is important!

Key matrix to use these days for social apps:
1. Entry event distribution (why and how users get back to the system). More ways to incentivize entries
2. # Outbound messages/Users
3. Viral messages/Conversion (clicks per post)
4. Virality (K-factor) on FB it’s max at ~.5 these days
5. Engagement (time on site, #times user play, #user actions)
6. Exit event distribution (mindset of user when they leave app, indicate potential problems)
7. Retention (revisit rate), measure of engagement. %% users come back in week-by-week bases 8. Lifetime network value revenue_per_user/(1-K)
9. Conversion to Paying Users
10. Avg revenue per Paying User

My Side Note: Advertising should be used for acceleration of successes and should feed from analytics. If detected that app is doing particalually well in some age/gender/area/channel – ads should be (auto) targeted to this area.

Posting to FaceBook feed using Graph API

2010-04-23T11:55:00.000-07:00

Graph API was announced at F8 with a promise to dramatically simplify the FB API.

I checked the read access over the new interface during the presentations and to my big surprise it worked flawlessly and from the first time.

When I tried https://graph.facebook.com/facebook, JSON-formatted info about the FaceBook page was returned (as expected).

Then I tried OAuth 2.0 way of accessing the API to post a message to the feed.

And to my even bigger surprise it worked too!

Here is what you need to do to access Graph API over OAuth:

1. Create a FB app, store app properties to a file:

$appkey = '7925873fbfb5347e571744515a9d2804';
$appsecret = 'THE SECRET';
$canvas = 'http://apps.facebook.com/graphapi/';

2. Create a page that will prompt user the access permission (I am prompting for the publish_stream and offline_access permissions at the same time)

//http://apps.facebook.com/graphapi/
require 'settings.php';
$url = "https://graph.facebook.com/oauth/authorize?";
$url .= "client_id=$appid&";
$url .= "redirect_uri=$canvas/callback.php&";
$url .= "scope=publish_stream,offline_access";
$url .= "&type=user_agent&display=popup";
echo("$url");

3. Create a page to handle OAuth call-back with token and do the feed post:

require 'settings.php';

function
callFb($url, $params) {
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt_array($ch, array(
CURLOPT_URL => $url,
CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS => http_build_query($params),
CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER => true,
CURLOPT_VERBOSE => true
));
$result = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
return $result;
}

$token = $_REQUEST['access_token'];

$hello = "Hello from Graph API";
$params=array('access_token'=>$token, 'message'=>$hello);
$url = "https://graph.facebook.com/me/feed";
callFb($url, $params);
P.S.

Important! Do not forget to select "new SDK" on the application settings page (I think that Facebook documentation fails to mention that)

“Default is social”, notes from the f8, FaceBook conference

2010-04-21T10:48:00.000-07:00

Policy changes:

Single permissions dialog
Data retention policy changes

Platform changes:

1. Social Plug-ins (tested on this blog)

o a way to provide personalized experience with “Like” button in the core, work on any site
o works via iframe, single line of HTML code
o activity stream plug-in (newsfeed filtered for events only related to the site)
o recommendations plug-in, personalized recommendation experience for users about any product or service
o log-in plug-in that shows friends who are already there
o FB chat plug-in
o “Like” button in the center with hope to serve 1 Billion “likes” within 24 hrs after roll-out

2. Open Graph protocol

o Semantic markers (my understanding is that is another name for microformats)
o Design to represent any object on the web – books, celebrates, movies, etc
o Objects has the same properties as FB pages

3. Graph API

o Complete re-architecture of current platform/API/SDK
o No need for SDK code
o Graph.facebook.com/ID/connection_name – is a universal way to access/search for objects, people, or connections
o RealTime callbacks (WOW! Finally! App will be notified what users do/change/ when they do that)
o OAUTH (2.0) (like it!)

What is more expensive than Gold?

2010-03-07T18:56:00.000-08:00

After a trip to a local pharmacy, and a sticker shock from one of the prescribed medications (one that treats pimples), I decided to cool myself with bit with arithmetic.

Retail price for the medication (30x 115mg tablets of Solodyn) is $700.99
Current price of gold is $1134 per ounce

Question: What is more expensive, Gold, or medication for treating pimples?

Solution:

$1134 x 1 ounce/31.10 grams = $36.46 is the price per gram of Gold
$700.99/(30*.115)=$203.18 is the price per gram of Solodyn

Conclusion: Solodin is more than 5 times more expensive!

Observation: No point of Gold prospecting these days. Just find a deposit of Solodyn!

"Giving a newborn baby a firehose to drink from"

2010-03-06T06:38:00.000-08:00

After a complete system rearchitecture, full code rewrite, and database migration, Trusted Opinion Site was re-born.

Birth was painful (as it should be) with sleepless nights and emotions were running high. But that's pretty much what was expected. What was not expected is the huge amount of crawling traffic the site got from the second it was up (hundreds of thousand hits per hr). It looked (and still feels) like we are under DOS attack. But we are not! That's the new reality - computers are much better at networking than humans are, and by the virtue of the Internet, they use their potential to the full extend.

I like the quote from our COO Todd Greene: Launching the site these days is like giving a newborn baby a firehose to drink from"

A few lessons from the launch:

What looks impossible and feels impossible, is possible as long as everyone ignores that it is impossible
Food is important! After 30 hours of work it becomes even more important than internet connectivity
People mood is more important that server health (and harder to fix)
Shortcuts always bite. Taking shortcuts in data migration bite really hard. Even in order to save a few hours of downtime, even if you really-really want it, do not take shortcuts!
And, the most important, do not forget celebration when the job is accomplished! Even thou I put it into the migration project plan, we managed to ignore the task.

From "Personalized Search for everyone" to "Personalized recommendations" to "User behavior control"

2009-12-07T12:26:00.000-08:00

Google took a big step from generic search to customized and personalized one with the announcement of Official Google Blog: Personalized Search for everyone. Do we like personal attention? Sure! What's the price? Privacy. Since technology is relying on tracking user behavior from cookies embedded by Google. Privacy advocates, I am sure, will be furious over the "big brother" watching every step and move. As for me, I think, privacy battle is lost for general Internet user. Those who care should be using anonymizer software and other tricks and tools.
So what's next? I think - personalized recommendations. Google is sitting on the top of goldmine of ratings and reviews crawled from the Web, extracted and normalized from RDF and microformats (http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/05/introducing-rich-snippets.html). And that will be a huge step for the giant - whoever can tinker with recommendations can control user buying behavior. And as you can guess, how much money is behind that... Advertising market will be a part of a bigger "user behavior control" market not too far in the future.

The best job post I have seen in a long while

2009-07-01T10:58:00.000-07:00

Even in this job market companies should be creative to attract star programmers:
http://sfbay.craigslist.org/sfc/eng/1246353621.html
Great job hunting for great talent!

Why Google should give Google Phones to unemployed

2009-05-28T10:53:00.000-07:00

As an act of unprecedented generosity (or desperation) Google decided to give gPhone to every attendee of Google IO conference. While I can certainly applaud Google for the move (as a direct benefactors, of casue) a few red lights start to flash on my technology-navigation dashboard:
1. Does gPhone lost so much ground to iPhone (in terms of applications) that desperate and costly measures are required?
2. If (1) is true, users will flock to iPhone and whatever Google trying to do to mitigate the situation will fail – iPhone will remain dominate cell phone technology(like Windows in consumer OS market) for a long while
3. If (2) is true, open source approach once again has to yield to commercial interests

Regardless of the Google motivating factors, the decision to give gPhones to Google conference attendees is flawed for a bunch reasons:
- Google IO attendees are Google fans already, they know about gPhone platform
- Conference attendees either write gPhone apps already or do not have interest in them – phone will not convert them
- Companies who pay conference registration fee, hotel and airfare can afford an unlock phone for developers

What they should do: Give it to unemployed!

How:
Engage government and EDD to reach unemployed software developers and give them the gPhone!

Why:
It will create a nice media complain and developers (with time on hands and a gPhone) will develop a number of applications to populate app directory. That, in turn, will translate to phone end-users experience and (with a short) time lag will be translating to new users on the platform.

Why 2:
Why did’t Google ask me? Hope they will do next time

And here are my (unedited and unorganized) notes from the conference sessions

Open Social Containers from Google:
- iGoogle (in home view, w. sandbox for developers)
- Gmail (nav view, provided as Lab feature at the moment)
- Calendars (in preview mode, nav+canvas view+ custom APi ext like google.calendar.showEvents)
- Wave (check it out!)

Sample: Quatermile gadget -> think about calories/food watchers

What makes gadget social:
· Leveraging social graph osaoi.people.get()
· Quick data entry using AJAX/Server communication with osapi.http.post[Google Visualization API + GWT]
· Dashboard View
· Container-specific extensions (opt)

How to grow/advertise social gadget:
· Container directory (iGoogle)
· Organic (share app/join team/use updates)
· Cross promote
· Adverte in other apps, etc
· Take to all Open Social Sites
· Create Mobile App that use the same data

Google App Engine (+ Java now!)
Container platform as services
HW/SW update
Scalable services via familiar/portable API
Get charge for what used – no dedicated hardware
Buildt-in App console
HTTP request limited to 30 sec, no server push
Request are run in sandbox environment
Jetty and Jasper(adapter to serv 2.5 API) on top of Google stack
Web.XML + Additional conf file
Optional SSL and Sessions

Google Services available for Google Web engine apps :
· Authentication-> Google Accts
· Data->Bigtable
· Caching->memcacheg
· Email->Gmail gateway
· Com.google.appengine.api
Demo:
http://java-demo.appspot.com/
Coming:
· Task queues
· Text search
· Incoming emails
· XMPP
· Large files

gMap Optimizations
Maps 3.0 – redesign with perf in mind
Use overlays instead of markers to show > 1000 markers (subclass GOverlay() class and draw inside it, use single CSS sprites!:)
Alt. solution – flash
Alt solution (>1000 overlays) clustering (to show size/loc of clusters). Use MarketClaster do clustering in JavaScript
http://code.google.com/qualify/ - take the test

SEO
- Use geo-targeting (note that .fr will not work for us users)
- Web server (IP) in location where it will serve users
- Shared hosting is OK
- Godaddy automatically link to web master tools (from API)
- New: crawler data will be available via API
- Content – good quality for users
- Navigation – search box, logical category navigation, how to get to home page, show what already visited or
- Shareable urls
- Describable file names
- Low-case urls
- Robots are case-sensitive
- Separate adult site content
- Important pages should be linked from home page
- Sitemaps
- Disallow login page/shopping cards, test from webamaster’s tools
- Create easily understood dynamically link structure (*ex: category=mobile, id=…) Google find ways to index only most relevant
- No session ID in the middle of the path! (it’s infinite for Google)
- No marks for what is expended on the page in URL!
- Descriptive name for links
- Do ajax, javascript on TOP of HTML
- Google will process OnClick content from now-on (but only if JavaScript is on the same page – not in the linked file!)
- If AJAX is used - create static link in addition!
- Text in Flash is visible and searchable but flash should be embedded in standard ways
- FRAMES and IFRAMES are interpreting within parent page (IFRAMES are treated as separate URLs thou)
- should include title, “descriptive” metadescription
- Title contains keyword
- No title duplication
- Keywords are important, adopt language of users
- For image search – text surrounding image, quality of images is important, ALT is very important as well as file names hyphen-separated, underscores will not be seen as word separated
- Video – static html, titles, popularity, comments, related, create video that is compelling to users. Uptime for site is important for video
- HTTP Response codes (404 when 404, 301 is OK too and keeps popularity). When site is down – use 503
- Webmaster tools, crawl errors
- Use custom 404 with link to search, home page, suggested pages
- Tweets – no ping service – should be linked to (unlike blogs) from other sites
- Reviews/comments – keep reviews on the same page as product
- Rich snippets marked in RDF – as microformat – to mark reviews http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/05/introducing-rich-snippets.html, http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=146645

Google Waves (http://wave.google.com/)
Look at twave J
What is available?
- Protocol (described in white papers)
- API (code.google.com/apis/wave)
- Open Source/ref implementation that could be placed on top of DB
- Demo
- Platform (waveprotoclol.org)
Sounds like open-source SharePoint competitor… Especially when it will be possible to effectively integrate into company workflow

OnLive - Gaming in the cloud

2009-03-24T23:29:00.000-07:00

Thanks to the right star alignment and generous invitation from my co-worker I was lucky to be in the audience of the OnLive service announcement. After 7 years of secretly developing (can not imagine how anything related to game development could be hidden from public eyes and ears for so long), absolutely mind-blowing OnLive gaming service was finally announced today to the crowd of game developers.

It is hard to believe that high-end gaming experience will be available soon for most of the mortals who have simple PC, MAC, or TV with a small adapter.

Technology is, basically, high end game servers hosted in the data centers with low-latency compression boards and light-weight clients. Client could be either small (1Mb) browser plug-In on PC/MAC or game adapter for TV that connects to home-grade DSL/fiber/cable modem.

Why OnLive is great? (at least on the demo, need to test myself at home):

unprecedented performance approaching realism

access to high-end games + games developed specifically for online experience

User hardware does not get obsolete

Extremely high-performance shared serves with 1-2 GPUs

Special card for HW video compression
1 [ms] latency (can you believe that?)

Minimum requirements for the end-user hardware:

bandwidth 1.5 Mbps for regular video resolution
HDTV experience 5 Mbps downstream (very light for upstream, great for DSL)

Typical Social features (something that is really expected these days:

Arena
Brag clips
Spectating roles

Plenty of Games already available on OnLive:

Family games (LegoBatman is there)
Did not see any cooperative games but who cares – killing is more fun
Sport -spectator games are there. Are they more fun than “real” sport? Claim is that it will be possible to have 1 Mil people watching games. Hard to believe but - why not? Technologically it is possible these days

Gamers will love:

Simplicity
Gaming (and good gaming, finally!) on MAC
For Multi-player games – fast connection between game servers (LAN party environment)
OnLive makes easier to watch the game, why bother clicking and tapping when you can see masters at play.

Game Publishers will love it: rental model + exposure to bigger market. No surprise that big names are already there:

• Electronic Arts
• Ubisoft
• WB
• Take two
• THQ
• Epic Games
• Eidos
• Atari
• 2D Boy
• CodeMasters

Game developers will like it:

Single code – 3 devices
Social features integrated

Hardware Companies will hate it:

No need to buy and upgrade expensive game PC

Why I am still skeptical?

Networks are optimized for bandwidth – not latency, will that ruin the experience?

I am waiting (patiently) for the winter ’09 general service launch…

Freebase Hack Day

2008-10-27T08:30:00.001-07:00

Struggle to be buzzword compliant

2008-08-19T08:15:00.001-07:00

I realized that there is a new wave of buzzwords coming on. Here is my very small dictionary:

behavioral targeting – targeting ads based on user's patterns

taking an action on app – interaction but not installing social app, like in new Facebook profile

social advertising - accelerated distribution of news about user actions beyond organic content

soc ads - ads that use social graph

soc ads (alt)- advertising on social media

integrating branding – using brand names/logos to advance applications

social shopping - making buying descriptions based on friends opinions

"buzzword compliance" - using all of the above in speech or writing

Facebook Friends Connect

2008-07-23T17:28:00.001-07:00

Is a way to extend external sites to provide:

FB identity
FB friends (relationship)
Feed to FB

Demo app at http://www.somethingtoputhere.com/therunaround

User experience:

login:

js login method requiresession(): detects state
of usr-FB relationship, log-in into FB if needed. If user has not authorised app -
present app auth dialog. If already has session - just go

init JS, require session

access FB data:

- FBML on external site - use JS FBML parser and replace in browser DOM with FB data

- JS based API to get FB data, REST API on the server site. Sessions work accross any API

- only small subset of FBML us supported at the moment

adding social content:

- use access API

Connections:

app developers can suggest connections (using
e-mail hash)

user get connect request on FB

Move content from external sites to FB app can register feed template (3 types of
stories)

call JS "showfeeddialog" to request user to

confirm data sharing on FB.

privacy protection:

app can cache data for 24 hrs (for performance reasons). Terms are the same as for FB platform

app can integrate data any way they like -

enable info sharing

SANDBOX is open, TFL - end of summer

More info: http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/Facebook_Connect

Scalability of Google IO

2008-05-28T11:48:00.000-07:00

It was interesting to watch today how Google is solving scalability problems:

Problem 1: Conference registration lines are too long.
Google's solution: Let anyone in. No badges are required before 2 p.m.

Problem 2: Too many people who want to attend the keynote speech by Vic Gundotra
Google's solution: Still let anyone in. People can sit anywhere on the floor

Lesson: relax rules if they stay on the way of scalability

Design & Learning from Viral Applications FB App lifecycle

2008-04-24T10:19:00.001-07:00

Step 1

(Initial Growth):

Initial Growth (based on advertising principles) – all about conversion rates (#times people see profiles, canvas page, invites, activity stream, feeds). Goal MAX conversion rates for each channel. Consider long-term user experience. Effective (aggressive) methods at the beginning will not work later in app life cycle

Design/implement based on simple concepts. Viral channels are more important than features!

Step 2

(validation):

Goal: concept validation.

Iterate/execute rapidly. Viral loop. A/B testing. Do not complicate – it will make execution/testing/measuring. Goal: figure out features, do not be emotional, and be guided by data/metrics.
Use web matrix (Google analytics for conversion rates)

[Social Application classes]

Channel (superwall)
Content
Dating
Games (related to dating, affinity groups)
Gifts
Self-Expression

Understand audience, look at market size, potential penetration (set expectation right :). Ning has impressive numbers but segmented. iGoogle (10-15 Mil, virality is not clear yet, how to build initial friend list?)

Understand activity stream.
Focus on simple
Focus on activity stream that all users can engage into

Typical 30 releases/day during the post-launch phase.

Take extra care of 1-st impression (app about page is important!)

Step 3

(grows, tuning along the way)

Start with the call to action

Figure out conversion rate (make sure x*y>1)

Preview Page messages turning

App turning

Step 4

(Promote!)

Buy additional throughput, engage ad network

Make sure that viral loop works – otherwise money will go into drain.

Use different add network.

Cross-promote apps!

Step 5

(Engagement)

Congratulations!

How to make users to come back? How to make users to come back?

Saturated social circles. Critical mass.

Good functionality bring users back – tune for user experience! 1-to-1 becomes more important than invites. Use e-mails and messaging. Do not spam – interact by telling only when something happened.

Step 6
(disengagement)

Understand that every channel will degrade over time. Set your expectations right!

Location Web presentation at Web 2.0

2008-04-24T10:08:00.003-07:00

Location Web

Location = context

Context -> higher relevancy -> user experience

Location is a killer mobile app enabler

Yoursite.com?lat=&lon=

Fire Eagle – location broker (get all inputs, have app (publisher) registered). Dopler as publisher. Fireball get access for the info

DO use FireEagle PHP library! (Update, query, integrate)

Geolocation methods:

Triangulation (WiFi 20[m], GPS 1[m], Cell Tower 2000[m]) {Loki JavaScript API http://loki.com/developers} Garmin device plug-in, get path data GPX

Association (IP Geolocation) {quova, ip2location}

Geo Term Extraction {MetaCarta Query Parser API, Urban Mapping GeoMods}

Geocoding {geonames (started with Tiger geoset in Postgres), Google, Yahoo, Geocoder.us}

JavaScript API

Browser.getGeoLocation() - LocationAvare.org

Mobile location

iPhone (WiFi, cell tower) and other mobile API

Symbian S60

J2ME/JSR-179

WHERE Widgets $3/mth for users, no need to have relationship with phone network provider – where wil do it for you {where.com}

SkyHook (WiFi only)

Cell Tower info sources

ZoneTag (yahoo)

OpenCellID

CellDB

WhereCamp unconference May 17-th, May 18-th. Mt. View

Important: only integrated (combined) location methods can provide reliavle location info

Geocoding Links:

geoNames web services: geonames.org/export
Google Geocoder class: code.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/services.html#geocoding
Yahoo geocoding API
Geocoders.us

SEO Optimization

2008-04-24T10:08:00.001-07:00

Cloaking

(Serve different content, could be in violation of Google policy)

IP delivery is used to get around Google bot (detect if bot is coming from one of Google's computers)

Use English->English translation to detect/display cloaked page

301 redirect

And know when to use 302 instead

Supplemental Index

Supplemental index queries does not work on Google any more. Use method described below:

Site:www.xyz.com –allinurl:www.xyz.com show only main index pages, can be used in calculation in %% of

To take out of sup index – pop-up rank by linking to home page or by any other method

Duplicate content

Dilute page importance – get rid of them when possible

Scan for it!

Block duplicate content for crawlers by rel=nofollow

CSS

Complete control over design/HTML

Menu based on CSS shows SE what is linked (much better than JavaScript)

Can put more emphasis on what is important

Image replacement (careful to not been caught), nice way to get around brand police

Keyword Research

Google Suggest (from toolbar)

Yahoo.com (from yahoo.com)

Keyword Density

Ranks.nl

Density is not as important as location of these words

"Thin Slicing"

Title text is the most important on the page. Have list of all URL, and list of titles. Make sure singular vst to plural, common misspellings

Reverse Engineering of competitors

Siteexplore.yahoo.com (with Y! account) Look into internal pages -> export into single .tsv file as the result of all search.

Generate "smart" inbound links

Write an article on W3C and link back to your site. They publish in press articles.
Become contributor, etc for non-profits
Buy existing site for SEO purpose (slowly change content: weeks, month)
Code.google.com passing page rank
Donate to site thanking to in-kind donors that put your link on the page
Put comments on blogrolls
Wikipedia (do not edit from your Co address). Wikipedia is no-follow but journalists and bloggers go-to the link
Digg. It is as much about submitter as about content. Know community to target, do a lot of altruistic stuff (like with Wikipedia) or go to top 100 digger list and ask Digg pro
YouTube, Flicker are not generating pagerank but bloggers and journalist will find you and link from there articles. Titling is very important. Build a micro-site, have co name as log-in on YouTube.

SEO Tools

SEO for Firefox extensions

Tools.seobooks.com

Blogs

Seomoz.org

References

Netconcepts.com

API Design notes from Web 2.0 Expo

2008-04-24T10:07:00.001-07:00

Twitter API Experience

It is ALL around REST these days. Even Google abandoned more complicated API in favor of RESTfull

For Twitter API more that 80% of overall traffic these days

Twitter manages developer community over Google Group

400 applications added by hand to the directory from e-mail, tons more are around and not the catalog

XML, JSON, and many other formats supported

Grow API organically (started with 2 methods and no documentation), from the conversation with developers "I can do X if you do Y"

Documentation is really important – at least reverse engineer. Doc should describe at least: How do I start? Is API crawlable? How to dive into the API?

Support developers 24 hrs is important – be present! If not listening, developers will go forward.

Delegate to other developers who are active within the community. Do not forget to socially reward them.

Scaling from API prospective. XML, JSON are not designed for scale by itself. Do it early is a big win. Dedicate part of server farm for API – do not mix destination and API on the same servers

Security issues. API is where bad-behaving users will go first. Audit. Monitor. Expect what can be leaked.

What twitter did wrong?

Did not start with api.twitter.com
Did not version the API
Did not make life easy (or easier) for Flash developers
Did not automate (statistics, admin use, app galleries)
Many more

New in twitter API

Rudimentary geolocation support
More consistency between methods
Parity between user-side and API side

Misc Observations

It is unclear how to make API into business. It is a trade-off between value from dev community and users. Mashery pretends to monetize on API. QOS is an option.

OAuth [http://oauth.net/] is absolutely where authorization goes on API. More complex on production and consumer site.

Jabber/XMPP – most clients pull constantly. A lot of overhead can be saved this way. But overhead and lack of libraries slow down the effort.

Web->API->SOA Model provides: separation of concerns, direction to move towards

Faces of APIs: XML, spreadsheets, static virtual maps, static URLs, SOAP, JSON, serialized PHP, JavaScript callbacks, etc

The only way to transfer date/time data – UNIX timestamp

New API directions:

Amazon S3/(with billing associated with it and authentication)
OAuth – emerging standard for 3-d party in client-server relationship. Create a situation to provision on behalf of other users.

Tagging entrepreneurs at StartupSchool

2008-04-21T12:01:00.000-07:00

Tagging entrepreneurs at Startup School

Startup School this weekend was by far the best entrepreneur event this year. By amount of energy floating around and amount of applause from the audience it may well surpass rock concerts in New York.

Interestingly enough it was not as much about mechanics of razing startup money or even building a viable business, but rather about common sense and a choice that entrepreneurs need to make. The choice is between going to venture capital firms in hope of building next great Googles and Facebooks with very little odds and building successful money-making companies with much bigger odds. People interested in later should checkout great speech by David Heinemeier [http://omnisio.com/startupschool08/david-heinemeier-hansson-at-startup-school-08] (creator of the Ruby on Rails framework), others may continue to read my boring notes.

Suggestions for startups to raise money

What to do:

Talk only to “good” investors

Tell existing story

Do deals in parallel

Thech founders are the key in SV

Create San Hill Buzz

Do not be distracted by fundraising process (no more than ½ person assigned to the process)

What all investors look for:

Market (big & growing fast). Startup cannot create markets. Customers with “hair on fire”. Unfair advantage.

Great Team

Great Product

Story that all investors want to hear:

Exploding market.

Best solution.

Best team.

Suggestions and observations

Get twice $$ what you think is needed

Avoid “super pro rata” in terms – makes hard to get second round

Deal making is about alternatives – more the better

Talk to CEOs of potential investors

Evl0-ery company has a rocky beginning

37 Signals

Tagging developers from Fortune 500 to fortune 5M. Different rules in that world – NO VC. No sales cycles – just solving one problem may be at little better than someone else

FriendFeed

-“listen to your users”

Amazon, Cloud computing

· AWS bandwidth passed Amazon retail bandwidth worldwide

· S3

· EC2

· SimpleDB

· SimpleQuue

· Flexible payment service

· Mechanical Turk

BlueOrigin [http://public.blueorigin.com/index.html] (Vertical takeoff and landing vehicle company funded by Jeff Bezos) as user for EC2 for computation

Google app engine. Will it be real competitor to EC2? Time will show.

“Customer focus is more important than competitive focus” – thank you, Jeff Bezos for setting right priorities for Amazon

Chronology of a painter or my weekend with wekendapps

2008-02-25T22:13:00.000-08:00

Why? Because programming is fun. Lots of fun. Working as CTO I mostly help organize this fun for others. It’s time to have some fun for myself.

Where? Wekendapps in Santa Clara

When? February 22 to February 24, 2007

Day 1

Started as typical Silicon Valley meet-up, with pizza and bunch of people crowded in small room, event fun was started. Some people came ready and prepared with friends and code snippets. I did not. Anyway crowd (with some help from organizers) gravitated into groups of people with similar skills. Ideas were presented. I liked what David’s idea on searching FB users through their connections and common photo tagging. Started discussing/planning/coding the app.

Day 2

Spent morning socializing. Realized that app we thought about on day one is not viral. David shared another idea – ‘painter’ who will draw a classic masterpiece on user’s profile page over time. Sort of growing gifts but more ‘sophisticated’.

4 p.m. really started to work on the app – put together “project plan” (list of to-do items) and assigned tasks. Plan is to finish the app early Sunday. For the rest of the day (till 2 a.m.) we dug dip into PHP/SQL/CSS/FBML.

12:30 a.m. conversation in the room became more philosophical. Main topic discussed – why do people laugh? Is it because people lose control of themselves?

1:30 a.m. it took me a while to figure out why < href="”link”"> does not work - sleep time.
BIG respect to people who did not leave and stayed for the overnight coding session.

Day 3

9 a.m. we are back. Bagel and coffee are timely. Thank you, organizers.

10 a.m Set up a target to finish coding by 2 p.m. Plenty of time to finish the up (or what we thought)

12 noon realized that we cannot finish by 2 even if we skip the lunch. Skipped the lunch.

2 p.m. uncovering one limitation after another realized that we cannot finish even by 4 p.m.

4 p.m. David added the code to post the painter to user’s profile page. Only dots and occasional lines are visible – no painter, no picture… Started panicking and think about radical change to the design – instead of posting BFML with css – post static images. Thanks to Elsie who saved us from taking that route – it would take forever and ever to finish the app.

5 p.m. Crowd of investors arrived. Asking questions like “do you use PHP libraries?”. All deadlines are passed and we are not finished. Moved to more quit conference room.

6 p.m. Feature complete. Started end-to end testing. Realized that critical functionality (acceptance of the painting after application is installed) does not work. With the tribal knowledge of surrounding people, David figured out what could be done to fix the flaw. Changed DB schema and countless places in the code.

7 p.m. other teams are presenting ... We still working on the code. Promise to organizers that we are close and soon will be ready to present.

7:15 p.m. development server is down… Most of the code is there…

7:25 p.m. server is back

7:30 p.m. moving to “production” – creating production keys and set of files. Integration end-to-testing. Promised that we really-really ready and will come to the main conference room in a minute. App is fully functional

7:45 p.m. testing end-to-end functionality. I want to remove app from my account so that I can test invite-install path. Instead of removing the app from my profile, deleted application all together from the developers environment. Ooops. Should have camera with me to take picture of David.

7:55 app restored

8:05 discussing ‘code freeze’. David still changing message text.

8:15 presentation

P.S.

Side-effect of all of the fun, painter app, http://apps.facebook.com/sendartist/ is up and running.

Enjoy!

Highly scalable web solutions

2008-02-12T14:49:00.000-08:00

Amazon Web Services user’s group meeting last night was slightly derailed from the presenter’s topic to the discussion about current approaches to highly scalable web architecture. Question is simple: in the new world of Web/Facebook applications when millions of users could be added virtually overnight, question of scalability should be addressed from the day one of application design.

In order to make scalable Web application the most important consideration is the foundation it is build upon – choice of the database architecture. I know have seen four radically different approaches:

Database clusters
Database replication
Federated data layer
Non-relational databases

Clusters require virtually no code change, scaled up to 32 nodes and in cases of Oracle (do not know anyone else who did it right) are prohibitively expensive for start-ups

Database replication seems so appealing at the beginning… Basically forward all data update/write requests to the master and read the data from slaves. Not much of a code change, cheap/free databases could be used (think MySQL), any slave could become the master when needed… Unfortunately like with the cluster you can go only so far with that – performance will start degrading to the level of inusability after 10-15 slave nodes.

Federated data layer is what Hi5 and many other smart companies are using today. Basic idea – split data horizontally by assigning range of item ids to separate db instances and have “smart” data layer figure out where to go for data request/updates. Major problems: hard to implement “right”, aggregated queries (like selects/count across large data sets, etc) should be executed against many data sources and then aggregated before returning data to the app. Rather challenging to implement and labor intensive any non-trivial scenarios.

Non-relational approach. Sort of new kid on the block (or may be old fellow we used to call object db?). Anyway, with introduction of SimpleDb by Amazon, people start taking it more serious. Basic promise – you trade database features for scalability. Perfect if data is used just to store and retrieve objects and their properties. But what to do about data set aggregation? Navigate through the whole set of objects? I guess, we have to wait for the answer for a while…

As usual – no silver bullets, no magic wands. Well, at least software architects have job security...

OpenSocial and Ning

2007-12-16T22:24:00.000-08:00

Ever since OpenSocial platform was announced by Google I wondered who will benefit the most from cross-social-network applications?
Probably not Google - it was forced late into the game by Facebook and realized that market will not accept another closed platform for the social apps.
Could it be MySpace? Surely it will be a nice addition to the kaleidoscope of widgets crowded on user's pages.
And only today I realized the major benefactor - Ning.com with its own ecosystem of small social networks. One-time effort of creating a hosting container for the OpenSocial by Ning will be realized by all of the hosted networks.
Simply brilliant combination of open standard and Ning's business model!

Lessons learned from CS377W (Stanford facebook class)

2007-12-14T09:49:00.000-08:00

Stanford successfully created a unique mix of:

Open social network platform (thanks to Facebook)
Exceptionally talented students
Focus on success (as defined in social network world by number of app users, stickiness, time per visit)
Ways to measure success (thanks to Google analytics)
Sponsors with their push for app monetization (Social Media)
Technical leadership (thanks to Dr. BJ Fogg, and Dave McClure)

From this mix number of Facebook applications emerged. No all of them were equally successful but each one teaching their own lesson on success in a new world of social media. Common theme that I managed to pick up:

Survival of the dumbest. Successful applications do not expect anything from the user a beyond couple (or even better - one) click. What application do should be obvious within 3 seconds. This seems to be the attention span for an average FB app user (my dear readers – you are not typical J )
Focus on invitations. With the number of viral growth channels available for FB applications, invitations that is the part of application work flow remains the most important factor for the application user base growth
Math is important. Teams that figured out correct set of measurements, instrumented FB applications to provide these measurements, and acted on the feedback happened to be the most successful applications
Application name is important
Good graphics helps

6. Know where FB deficiencies could be turned into application advantages (successful applications are hard to uninstall and there is a reason for it)

7. Programming language/platform matters. PHP seems to be the winner

If you are still with me, below are my unedited notes on individual applications:

Pictures with collaborative filtering (http://apps.facebook.com/funnyimages/)

Pick me up (http://apps.facebook.com/pickups/) experimented with whether or not to enforce rules on number of friends to be invited to use the application. Lesson: tell the rules but do not enforce them

Funny images (http://apps.facebook.com/funnyimages/) – rate images – send pictures to friends, verticals helped– cars, architecture – force to invite 10 friends to unlock application (!) exp growth for architecture app 40% day-by-day

Good eats (http://apps.facebook.com/good_eats/) – social restaurant recommendation – find places to eat – high user engagement 6 pages/10 min avg. friends who are using the application. Activities, search, updating recent recommendations. 1-clik recommendations -. Virtual points- goes to ranking (medieval system) – leader board on the dashboard

Lovechild (http://apps.facebook.com/luvchild) – collaborative digital parenting. Multiple parents, number of actions. Compete to rise the best lovechild. Branded digital goods – branded outfits and apparel . Great imaging by Sylvia Yun! You are the best!

Share the Love( http://apps.facebook.com/sharethelove/) – card game – fail because users invite only friends, no feeds [critical for installations]. Change to “Share the Love”

- Do not give users too much to do – single action! – encourage communication
Exp growth /1/2 mil installs

Bless me (http://stanford.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=13773470170) – single action 5 weeks – 300K users. Religious users. User retention. Marketing – iteration. Simple – attractive – not destructive

Matchmaker(http://apps.facebook.com/hookster/) – Initially did not work. Main action should be invitation!!! Hug me -> squeezeMe. User receive and reply on the same day.

Dodgeball (http://apps.facebook.com/dodge_ball/). Nobody reads rules. 2 step process for throwing balls 2% grows rate. Dimmer application – single – “hit 10 friends” and “open new level” 18%. Cleaner interface 1-step process!

Wall of Shame (http://apps.facebook.com/shamewall/) –later transformed to Yo Momma. Bulletin board of what people hate. Leverage invite. Distribute jokes. Sending insults using invitation mechanism. Simplicity- invite – know the demographic (cynical may not be the best)

Polls (http://apps.facebook.com/pollposition) – People a lazy^3 Took off when created pre-define questions

Compliment box (http://apps.facebook.com/compliment-box/) – good first page with images of friends. Benefit? Social Value? Guide the user – remove functionality.

Super Status (http://apps.facebook.com/suprstatus/) – lightweight communication – microblogging space. Attention span \ Go away from Facebook’s ‘is’ style to do reach content. Commenting on statuses. Tags.

Scribbled Photos (http://apps.facebook.com/photo_graph/). Mash-up on top of photos. Creativity. Random selection of first photo. Colors/undo. Instantaneous gratification. Pre-fill all possible slots. Future: stamps – pre-drown content.

College: the numbers – engaged Kaplan for the distribution – name recognition. See where the score are in relation with other applying to the college.

Social Buzz (http://apps.facebook.com/socialbuzz/). My experts. My credibility. Micro connections between friends. Propagate content between friends. Optimize first user experience.

Commonalities(http://apps.facebook.com/in_common/). Look into profiles. To come up with common elements.

Social Buzz. (http://apps.facebook.com/socialbuzz/) Kiva, microfinance. Distributing money from sponsor shown in the application. 40 loans.

OneVoice. Started as Radio/TV for FB. Users rate [U-tube] playlists and DJs. Use emotions for ratings.

Save the Rainforest – vocab game. Started with the idea of creating socially meaningful application. Vocab game. Monetization from ads to benefit the cause.

Guess Who? (http://apps.facebook.com/guess-who/) Board made out of mutual friends create shared intimacy ! act fast on surprising data.

Car overload. Engage advertisers by segmenting the market and providing relevant to app advertising.

Fun, Inc. Split app. 1 button and text box. Acton –and- reaction. Force to invite friends. Had to abandon .NET for PHP.

Tournaments (http://apps.facebook.com/mytournaments/). Create/share tournaments. 1 click creation tournament +

Send Hotness (http://apps.facebook.com/sendhotness/) – 5 Mil users(send hotness to friend). Viral factor = conv ration * invitation ratio * engagement rate > 1. Required to add users. 10 – req – 20 Max limit of FB.

KissMe (http://apps.facebook.com/kiss_me/) 1-st to reach Mil in class. Full moon on the quad. Appealing action. Provocative. Hard to reject a kiss. First gain users – next create deeper experience.

Perfect match (http://apps.facebook.com/perfect_match/). “Stable marriage problem” math problem. Announce result first – than collect preferences and improve result. 3.5 Mil users. User mini-feed. Catchy message. Invitations. Next – live/love chat.

Hugs (http://apps.facebook.com/hugpeople) 2 Mil users, 15 Mil hugs

Summary: best practice – go viral first – then deep; instrumentation/analytics; session time, K-factor; iteration dev process. Viral factors-> message -> measure. Extremely short dev time/cicle hrs-days.

leading social networks

2007-12-03T11:54:00.000-08:00

Here is the dynamics of the socical network use based on the Alexa's data:http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details/bestbuy.com?site0=myspace.com&site1=orkut.com&site2=facebook.com&site3=hi5.com&site4=tagged.com&y=r&z=3&h=300&w=610&range=3m&size=Medium
Is there a dip in Facebook use? And OpenSocial is not on the Myspace or Hi5 yet. What would be really interesting is to see how this dynamic will change when social apps based on OpenSocial platform will be rolled out.

P.S.
http://lsvp.wordpress.com/2007/07/23/top-social-networks-for-engagement-some-suprises/

MySpace will join OpenSocial

2007-11-01T12:53:00.000-07:00

MySpace will join the list of social networks participating in OpenSocial initiative. Other members include:

Orkut
Salesforce
LinkedIn
Ning
Hi5
Plaxo
Friendster
Viadeo
Oracle
SixApart

Looking forward for the announcement tonight at Google

FreeBase.com

2007-10-17T10:52:00.000-07:00

WOW!
Finally there is a way to bring some order to the data on the Web: http://www.freebase.com/
I am very excited about the project and the very elegant way of linking structural data, unstructured data, images, people, time, and place in a form that is both accessible by humans and computers.

- Gene (http://www.freebase.com/view/guid/9202a8c04000641f8000000005f1f68a)

Why Facebook will eclipse Google

2007-10-10T09:13:00.000-07:00

Today, when Google stock reached a new high of 623.22 and company seems like a dominant player of the Internet game, I take liberty to declare that within 5 years Facebook will eclipse Google.

Why:

Social media potentially more profitable than search. Search is either "find-and-leave" pattern or "search-clickonthead-leave" (and only on this exit money are made by the search company) . Social media is where people come to communicate, express them self, play, hang around, date, and (one day) shop together. Longer people stay - more money could be made.
Facebook already gained and most likely will retain leading role controlling big slice of the social graph. They are brilliant in terms of design, user focus, and execution.
Facebook engaged developer community in the level I have not seen since Java days.
Facebook is heading toward the application infrastructure and development platform that will rule the market similar to how Microsoft used to rule for many years with Windows
My blog that I started as software architecture becomes more-and-more Facebook application development blog :)

Graphing Social Patterns: The Business & Technology of Facebook

2007-10-09T07:24:00.000-07:00

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=6024102215

Road for developer success on Facebook

2007-10-03T15:25:00.000-07:00

Two must-read links for FB app developers dreaming about crowds of users:

http://www.insidefacebook.com/2007/06/07/10-tips-for-releasing-your-facebook-application-and-maximizing-growth/

http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/10/03/seven-steps-to-graphing-your-facebook-strategy/

Inside Facebook

2007-10-01T20:29:00.000-07:00

Read a nice book-blog recollection of an early days of Facebook. Stories are very much similar to early days of other companies, successful, or not. So what make it a fun reading is to decipher what really made this company a success story unheard since stratospheric flight of Google. Book is short. I read it in classic "paper" format but it is also available as pdf from writer's site: http://www.fbbook.com/

Inside Facebook: Life, Work and Visions of Greatness

JavaScript in Facebook applications

2007-09-20T16:06:00.000-07:00

Facebook (finally) allowed Java Script in FB applications outside of IFRAME
http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/FBJS
Among other things, I liked how elegantly they are creating namespaces separating different applications on the same page. Seems that it cold be a security hole here - it is possible to enumerate java functions on the page and "impersonate" user actions with another apps installed on the same page. Other than that - it's great that we can use JavaScript outside of the IFRAME sandbox.

SF New Tech September Meetup

2007-09-06T09:58:00.000-07:00

Click here to check out
The SF New Tech Meetup!

Visisted SF New Tech September Meetup last night.

Very exciting! People in the audience simply rock. Formal presentations, on the other hand, are behind the curve. Meaning that smart people are not presenting or presenting in other venues? Or rather "work" than "talk"? :)

http://www.conduit.com presented upgrade to their browser plug-in. Good implementation but I do not personally see much of the future in the environment of customizable dashboards, gadgets and widgets with much richer experience

http://www.sezwho.com also a couple years behind the curve

http://www.us4real.com - good use of GMap mash-up with RSS feeds. Generated active discussion and bunch of suggestions that were "pushed aside" by the presenter as difficult or computationally intensive to implement. Do we create start-ups to solve exactly these kind of problems? Hire a part-time architect to sort-it-out.

http://www.globalmotion.com - showed a Web site that is, basically, MediaWiki + custom plug-in. Impressed by accurate implementation, good job. Nothing revolutionary, but, really, is it really needed?

http://www.crazymenu.com - I understand obsession with scheduling lunch outings. A lot of work needed (especially integrating with chat software).

The 60-Second Soapbox is were most of the fun were. Apparently there are companies that specialize in placing people to work with "stock options" only compensation, people that want to grab the microphone just to show off there theatrical skill, I should admit, very impressive.

Summarizing the above was fun and I am looking forward for the next event.

Facebook Developer Garage - Palo Alto

2007-08-22T17:11:00.000-07:00

A must-attend for Facebook fans:
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=4184233826

Ping me here so that we can shake hands there

Minimo released by Mozilla

2007-08-22T16:58:00.000-07:00

At some point (last year) I was discussion with Mozilla regarding location-aware application development for the upcoming phone-based web browser. Too bad that did not materialized into the code... Still browser is good and hopefully will capture well deserved attenshion and appreciation of the users. In my opinion it is superior to the much-hyped iPhone browser.
Here is the link for the app:
Minimo 0.2
Win Mobile is the only platform at the moment. I am sure other builds will be available soon.

Google Calendar Gadget

2007-08-21T16:46:00.000-07:00

Goggle just release Calendar Gadget spec:

http://code.google.com/apis/calendar/calendar_gadgets.html#UsingiCal

I like it. Especially the elegance of incorporating metadata into the iCal format.

Will try to create calendar gadget myself by extending one that I created for connect12 a short while ago:
connect12.com conference Google gadget

Market maps

2007-08-09T16:34:00.000-07:00

Found nice (and free) market maps:
http://www.firstpartner.net/map/download.html
My favorite is "The Gadget & Widget Universe"
Others include:
- The Skype Ecosystem
- A Guide to VoIP
- A Guide to Web 2.0 Communities

Great for your desktop or the wall (if you still have some space left)

Procrastination

2007-08-08T18:47:00.000-07:00

What not to do when you have a problem:

Encapsulate it into a bigger problem

Ignore

Delay

Hide, disconnect, or use any other method to burry the head into the sand

Give up

Write to the blog about it instead of solving it

Mapping Platform Selection

2007-07-27T11:04:00.000-07:00

	Platform
	deCarta	ESRI	GoogleMap	MapQuest
Scalability	+	+	+	+
Internet/Internal	Internet (hosted)	Internal and Hosted	Internet (hosted)	Internal and Hosted
SDK, Ease of development	Navigation SDK, rapid deployment for hosted solutions, no code needed for simple apps (using Wizards)	ArcGIS for desktop, client and web dev.	KML, javascript SDK	SDK
Support	+	+	good public forums	+
Development Languages	JavaScript API, WS	Java, JavaScript, C++ for WinCE, Win XP, JSP, ASP, ASP.NET, ColdFusion, ArcXML, WS, Eclipse dev environment	JSP, ASP, ASP.NET, PHP, JavaScript lib	JSP, ASP, ASP.NET, PHP, XML, WS
Major Markets	Telecom, Wireless	Goverment, Public works	mostly Consumer, Google MapEnterprise for >500K hits a day or when ads are undesired	commercial, asset management, logistics
Other pluses	Free access to TeleAtlas data	Exact boundary data	integration with search platform, Maplets, add links to maps, iPhone integration	(relatively) long history, MapInfo consulting, Points of interest SDK

Facebook integration

2007-07-26T13:50:00.000-07:00

Here is the best intro into the Facebook architecture description:
http://www.slideshare.net/davidzhuang/facebook-platform-tech/
and API link:
http://20bits.com/2007/06/04/an-introduction-to-fbml/
and a sample (better than official one)
http://gallery.menalto.com/node/65135