Peter Skouhus

In this blog I’ll share with you some of the experiences we have gained by making a Facebook application.

Please note that I’m not a technical person, I am the guy running the company so some of the things I’m saying here may not be 100% correct for technical point of view.

Before do so I would give you a quick background about my company. 1902 Software Development Corporation http://www.1902software.com is an IT outsourcing company located in Manila, the Philippines. We are primarily into software outsourcing making Web applications, portal’s and things of that nature.

As an IT company because we need to be on top of everything that goes on in our industry so that when a customers comes knocking on our door we know a thing or two about the things they require from us.

With all the fuss about social media such as Facebook, twitter on MySpace we decided in September 2007 that it was time to get started on this. We wanted to get started developing for social media and we wanted to create something cool. Before we started we listed a bunch of goals/requirements as follows:

1. We wanted to do an application as opposed to just doing a quick tool, we wanted something that people would actually use.
2. The application should be something that, once developed, can manage itself without requiring any human intervention aside from a question every now and then from users.
3. Under no circumstances could we do an application which anyway, directly or indirectly would compete with any of our existing customers.
4. It is very important for us that the application would be challenging to do so that it could be used as a case for future customers.
5. We did not want to do an application which was already existing on Facebook, it should be something new and groundbreaking.

The application
Having done quite a bit of research and brainstorming we finally decided to do a job portal. We chose a job portal because we do not have any customers in this line of business and with the current economic crisis a job has the potential of being something people would use.

We decided to call the application for Konokor. Konokor means absolutely nothing in any language so getting into problems with trademarks etc. is therefore not be an issue. Furthermore we got all the domains we wanted (.com, .net) and so on.

When we develop software at 1902 we always start out by creating demand specifications where we write down all the requirements. Following that project phase we create the graphical user interface. Sometimes we do a little focus group or even create a dummy application.

The development process
We initially wanted to develop the application using C#, but after some trial and errors we dropped that in favor of using PHP. One of the things we noticed was that not everything was working quite as well in C# as it was in PHP. Our guess is that Facebook releases updates and bug fixes faster for PHP than they do for C#.

While the application was being developed the also made a quick website http://www.konoker.com as well as to YouTube videos explaining what Konokor is all about http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NG4QCcbjp6Y and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yxEL3zsnOGg

The entire process took about four months to complete.

Going live
The process of going live was really rather simple, all it took was to enable a few properties inside Facebook and then submit the application to Facebook. Facebook took quite some time to review the application before it turned up in the application repository. I will not give them any credit for that, it simply took too long time.

We also wanted to send out a press release. Facebook are quite squares on this requiring that all press releases are reviewed and accepted by Facebook prior to being sent out. The road to the press release took about a month and two or three written follow-up’s before they finally reviewed and accepted it. That time may be okay for a program made for fun in a basement somewhere but imagine if Konokor had been a commercial application we were depending on! It is simply not good enough and I hope that Facebook will be doing something in the near future about that.

During the going live period we tried various ways of advertising our new application including buying ads on the Facebook network. None of them really worked very well. Do it viral.

One of the things we found out was that many people are very very scared adding an application to the Facebook account. They think that the application can access all their private data, password etc. This is of course not the case. The problem is that medias in some countries (for instance the kingdom of Denmark) write things about Facebook which are outright wrong. These things are read by people who don’t understand the technical aspects and of course they then become reluctant to add applications.

One way Facebook can get around this problem could be to make a system which verifies the applications, sort of creating a Facebook seal of approval. Applications with the seal of approval should then seamlessly be allowed to be added to Facebook profiles without bringing up the warning page.

We, as a company would gladly pay to have our application reviewed by Facebook if that would remove the warning page.

I know that Facebook is working on some kind of application to review applications, but based on what I read people are complaining that if you take too long to have the application reviewed.
Needless to say if it takes to long to have an application reviewed people will not go for it. When a software developer or software company has developed an application and it’s ready for the market they don’t want to have to wait one or two months just to to have the application reviewed, nor do they want to wait one or two months to be allowed send out a flipping press release.

Conclusion
I believe Facebook? Absolute I do without any question, it is the single most interesting thing I have seen on the Internet to date. It gives me something new, something exciting, something which others are not giving me — it’s not just a new portal showing the latest news and gossip.

Facebook is great, it has enormous potentials no question about it but if you want to develop software for Facebook you have to have a bit of patience and expect and accept that it’s not like developing yet another website or web portal or community forum.

This blog was written by Peter Skouhus. Peter Skouhus is president of 1902 Software Development Corporation, an IT outsourcing company based in Manila, the Philippines.

You can read more about 1902 at http://www.1902software.com in English.

You can read more about 1902 at http://www.1902software.dk in Danish.