Netodex

I spent almost five years living in the USA before returning to the UK.  While I was there I came across a guy by the name of Steve Humprey.  He is a programmer but he has this uncanny ability to be able to explain how to write and change code so that anyone can understand it.

If you are building monetized sites or you want to do your own Facebook apps then learning PHP is a very sensible step. 

But it looks so complicated doesn’t it?

It doesn’t have to be.  This is not B.S. and I highly recommend it…

Learn to use PHP in two hours.

I just wanted to show what else can easily be done using the death prediction application as a framework and in very little time.

This application http://apps.facebook.com/grannypoosticks is built using the exact same code.  All we have done is ignore the random number part which tells them how long they have to live, fill the random lines file with a collection of nutty things a mad old lady might say and replace the grim reeper image with one of a batty gran.  Finally set the app title, etc and the job is done.

Granny Poo Sticks

The whole thing took about 15 minutes.

The key here is that you can quickly create different applications that will appeal to other people (some will find the death app in bad taste for example but would love the humour of the granny app) and the wider audiences you pull in the more ad revenue you will make.

And don’t forget, our licences allow you to use the code to make as many apps as you want for your own use at no extra charge!

Download the Application framework we used for this from here

Some of the stream changes on Facebook come into effect next Tuesday. 

As Facebook announced on the developer blog on October 23rd (http://developers.facebook.com/news.php?blog=1&story=321), the way that stream stories are rendered is changing.  From Next Tuesday one action link will be shown, and only the first 25 characters of that action link.  Also formatting characters will be stripped out (things like  ”[“, “{” and “|”).

These are not massive changes but they will affect all existing applications and will change how their stories appear.

For more updates and details keep an eye on the Facebook Developer wiki.  Here is a link to the developer roadmap – http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/Developer_Roadmap

We’ve just concluded an interesting facebook application experiment. We took two simple apps that were both built on the same basic code. They picked a random phrase and output it along with a random number.

We made one application a “fortune cookie app” which gave the user a lucky number and an amusing and often nonsense phrase like you would find in a real fortune cookie.

The other was a much more morbid ‘how and when will I die?’ application which used the random number to tell the user how many years they had left to live and the random phrase became the predicted method of death.

We got two facebook users (members of our team) to spend 15 minutes a day promoting by joining groups and publishing feeds to their wall, etc. Both members had roughly the same number of friends on their lists, etc. To keep it even more fair they would swap apps each day so if one was slightly better at promoting that than the other it should all even out.

The results on the growth of the two apps was astonishing…

Read entire article.