With every change comes new opportunities. As you’ve probably heard, the new Facebook profile design is about to be released any day now and with it comes a major change in APIs and features. If you have a Facebook application that you want to update for the new profile, join us for this fun event and get your changes done and over with in a day. We’ll bring together a lot of developers to help each other out, and we’ll have a few presentations to guide you through the process.

And if you’re not a developer, you’ll enjoy a panel discussion about the new opportunities that the new design brings.

Check out our schedule for July 26th, 2008 (subject to change).

RSVP here: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=19772679301

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So a lot of work was done last weekend, and 11 applications were launched and demoed to a live audience. Many developers built their very first Facebook application and launched it on a super compressed schedule.

Many of us are still recovering from the intense weekend, and that explains why our blog didn’t update quickly to describe the events of Sunday. We apologize for that. In the next few days we’ll upload a lot of videos and we’ll describe the applications that launched and the lessons we learned.

So the weekend is over, but work on our applications isn’t. Now that we have applications online, it’s time to tweak and update and add features. We’ll try to schedule follow up meetings to exchange experiences, and to strengthen our network. We’ll also work on enhancing our ad-exchange program to benefit all teams. Keep checking this blog in the next few days for more updates and to watch the weekend videos.

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Yes, that’s right: 11 Facebook Applications were demoed to a big audience on Sunday night, and it was a great evening. Some teams came on Friday with an idea and a partly written app, and others came without any expectations, met others in the weekend, chose an idea and fully implemented it and launched it in 36 hours (well, some teams worked way beyond midnight, and so they got more than 36 hours).

Overall, there was a lot of excitement, and also stress to meet the deadline. But it was fun. Here is a list of the applications that launched this weekend:

• Matchtastic
  Dating and rating to find friends and meet new people
• ASPECTS
  ASPECTS shows the world the different aspects of your life, your skills and your interests. Flaunt it now!
• PikiPages
  Create your own free form page. Drag and drop your pictures, mp3, videos, etc. Share your pages with your friends or the entire world, event outside facebook.
• Send me an artist
  Send an artist to your friends and let him draw you a picture in 4 days.
• HitchHikers
  Hitchhiker takes you in a journey of a lifetime. Reach a destination anywhere in the world by hitchhiking with your friends. Meet new people and hook up with interesting folks along the way. Track the progress of your hitchhiking adventure and those of the folks you’ve helped.
• Deface a baby
  App for fun to deface a baby, in any way you want, and share it with your facebook friends!
• Spring Break
  Go on virtual tours and meet new people.
• Blogs I Read
  Display our favorite blogs on your profile, connect with bloggers, and discover new blogs.
• OH Snap!
  Choose your best pictures and display them on your profile
• Peace Quiz
  The purpose of Peace Quiz is to show you what would happen if we had world peace. The Quiz will show you some statements of what peace would lead to in and you get to guess whether or not the real affect would be higher or lower than our calculations.
• Ad Exchange
  An app to exchange ads among all the apps released in the weekend to cross-promote each other.

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Kristen interviewed the developers of Deface A Baby, an application where you can draw on baby photos and share them. Here’s the link to the video.

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Here are two more apps that launched on Saturday.

Matchtastic - “find your perfect match”

Spring Break - Take your friends on a virtual spring break

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Here’s a list of facebook apps that launched on Saturday.

Deface A Baby - Draw on baby photos and share them.

Pikipages - “drag and drop” photos, videos, text, html code into a canvas that you can share.

Blogs I Read - Share the blogs you read, rank them, and post comments on it.

Ad Exchange - Advertising exchange to cross promote your application with others in the same group.

Note: Pikipages existed as a product since last year. Over the weekend, the developers created the integration with Facebook.

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Deface A Baby is the first app launched tonight at Weekend Apps. Users are given drawing tools to deface baby photos. Hmmm… where’s the button to share my defaced photo?

http://apps.facebook.com/defaceababy/

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Alex Notov, editor at Startupism.com, gave a quick talk on the value of using Adobe Flex for developing Facebook applications. Flex 2 is a cross-platform development framework for creating rich Internet applications (RIAs).

Alex gave over 20 different reasons for using Flex, but here are my top three from his presentation.

• Cross browser compatibility
• Graphics easier to create/manipulate, no need for DOM based GUI manipulation
• Build once, deploy to many. (blogs, widgets, Bebo, Myspace.)

Is learning Flex easy? Alex says YES, if you know object oriented programming languages like Java and C++. You can get started with the Flex Builder IDE that makes development easy.

Alex demo’ed two Facebook applications using Flex:

OneClick Pay - “OneClick Pay lets you perform secure payments online — for free.”

Home Builder (not released yet) - Users drag and drop furniture into a room.

Thanks to Adobe for giving away 2 copies of Flex Builder 3 Pro to the attendees.

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Around 12:30PM today, people in the room stopped working to share some thoughts and tips:

• Virality first, usefulness second: When one group showed Siqi their first idea, Siqi suggested virality should be the focus and usefulness second. So the group moved on to another idea. If the app is useful to the user, great! But the app does not encourage the user invite others, its not going anywhere.
• Secret sauce is in the measurement: Measurement functionality is more valuable than what your application does. Siqi recommended building in measurement functionality from the beginning. Developers must be able to track how users are responding to items such as newsfeeds and invitations.
• A or B?: How do you know if your changes are improving your application, user experience, virality, etc? Build functionality to allow one set of users to see/experience A, while another set see B. For example, show invitation A that says, “Please add this application” and show invitation B that says, “I would like you to add this application.” Measure what works, what doesn’t. And keep testing.
• Seamless Experience: Users are more likely to be comfortable using your application if your UI looks integrated with the Facebook’s colors, fonts, etc. You can find the Facebook CSS rules here on Elsie’s post at http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=7953767155
• What’s your name again?: Does your application have a name that’s hard to remember? The group building an app called “Social Match” got this advice from Siqi and changed their app name to Matchtastic.

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Last night, 12 teams started brainstorming ideas for a Facebook app that will be launched within 24 hours. After teams pitched their ideas last night, I went home thinking that I may witness the birth of the next great Facebook app by the time I wake up!

It’s Saturday morning at 10AM and I heard that some teams were working til 4AM this morning. At 10:30AM, a few teams gave an update on their status.

• “Dark and Stormy night” App: They have three developers working on it. They are using PHP and not sure if they can launch tonight. The advice to them was ‘reduce your feature set’.
• “Badges for aspects of Personality” App: Users give themselves descriptions such as “coder” or “scientist” which act as badges. When your friends vouch for your descriptions, the badges will be upgraded to indicate the truthfulness. The group is still working on the framework. When asked if they can launch tonight, they said, “ask us in a few hours.”
• Hitchhiker App: The team is still working on some unknowns.
• Social Match App: This team seems very close to completion. FBML and other parts are completed.
• “Giving a painting that reveals itself” App: This is app is similar to “Growing Gifts”. You give a friend a painting or some art that reveals sections of itself over time.
• “Promote Peace” App: Still working on it. It’s the team’s first experience building a Facebook app.
• Messaging App: The one man team found a developer in Argentina to help work on the project.
• “Deface Baby” App: Hope to launch tonight.

We will hear from other teams that will show up later today.

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