I’m fearful that it will start ridiculously early. (But glad that Piers took my suggestion and booked the Swedish American Hall, which is only a block away from my apt!)
JoshSpear.com, the the trend-spotting blog, published an interview with me today. It feels vain to link to it, but what the hell. I say some silly things. Thanks Carmen, Heather, and Josh!
For those of you following the facebook buzz, Altura Ventures recently announced they’d formed a fund, AppFactory, that would invest solely in facebook platform apps, advising entrepreneurs from launch to traction to monetization to liquidity.
When Facebook announced its platform, a set of application programming interfaces (APIs) and services that allow outside developers to inject new features and content into the Facebook user experience, Facebook, in essence, became the Social Operating System. Historically, the creation of an operating system, or a platform, has led to a new economy which includes a marketplace of applications.
Dave Henderson from Social Media sent me a link to their Facebook App Dev Con taking place in San Fran in 12 days. (Noah Kagan is also putting together a platform conference for later this year.)
I hosted the fourth NYC facebook meetup last week. Packed crowd, lots of great discussions, including a ton of demos. It’s clear that the deeper apps everyone’s been waiting for are just around the corner–we saw some of them last week!
We saw a great crowd this time with broad representation: big media companies (VH1), industry pundits (Jeff Jarvis), political junkies, individual and company developers (Daylife), even companies focusing exclusively on facebook (David Henderson of Social Media, which is hosting a conference on facebook apps in San Fran.)
Discussion centered around what the real numbers of installs and churn must be, future platform potential, and app monetization. The buzz around this platform is still insane, and the excitement’s only growing here in the Alley.
There’s some overzealousness apparent, but the killer apps (and there will be many) have yet to be discovered. With adoption and viral growth that’s already faster than any new technology on the web so far, it’s easy to see why people are so excited.
Wired just posted an article about Jelly, the quirky little twice-a-month coworking session I run from my apartment.
I even got a straight-faced joke in(!):
They started by informally inviting people over. Then a friend set up a wiki, another created a Google group, and soon people they barely knew were showing up. Anyone is welcome to attend — so far the open admission policy hasn’t led to any incidents. Were there to be any riffraff, Gupta feels he could control the situation. “I’m exceptionally strong,” he said.
Thanks to Anna Jane Grossman for the great article!
Facebook viral application growth continues to astound me. Amazin’ Giftbox, which Gil and released about two and a half weeks ago, has been seeing consistent total userbase growth between 15-20%, DAILY.
And it’s on autopilot right now–we’re doing nothing to make it grow. Wow.
A few things worth noting: (1) Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays seem to be “slow” days on Facebook. (See top chart.) (2) # of app installs per hour still correlates well to daytime hours in North America. (3) To increase the total userbase by 15% everyday, the raw number of people who add the application each day has to be dramatically greater than the day before. From the top chart here, you can see that’s exactly what’s happening (minus the slow weekend.)
FWIW, among apps with between 10k and 100k users, Amazin’ Giftbox is the 5th most viral app on facebook right now, according to Appsaholic. (It’s tied at 20% daily growth with the 4th place “Harry Potter Magic Spells”)
My friend Gil and I launched a facebook just under a week ago called the Amazin’ Giftbox.
It’s a simple free gift app with a twist — instead of sending gifts consisting of little graphics we create, we allow you to choose any item on Amazon.com and turn it into a virtual gift. Send a Segway, a book, a Camaro, flowers, diapers, anything. Amazon really does sell it all.
Anyway, it’s been interesting to see how viral apps can grow even now as app fatigue has started to set in. (See graphs at right.) Started from zero less than a week ago, we’re now at 3,562 users with zero promotion (beyond demoing the app a few times, which had minimal effect on the numbers.)
Top graph shows # of users added per hour, bottom is total user growth. It’s only a week, but still interesting.
Built from the ground up to be viral, Amazin’ Giftbox has outgrown our first app, Amazin’ Wishlist, which had a 4 week head start!
We’re actually over capacity at this point, but if you RSVP by early afternoon, we’ll make sure you’re on the door list.
Come, talk to others developing apps for Facebook, find people to work with, and enjoy some Sushi and beer, courtesy of Facebook.
You’ll also have an opportunity to demo your app if you’ve built one, and to talk with Facebook platform engineers via live video chat. Hope you can make it!
Photojojo turned 1 year old on April 1st and I’m pleased as punch to report that we’ve now surpassed 68,000 email and RSS subscribers to our kick-ass photography newsletter. Whew!
And according to Technorati, we’re currently ranked #549 out of all blogs. This stuff is pretty volatile, and I was psyched when we broke the top 1,000 blogs a couple months ago. Considering the fact that there are a bajillion blogs, we publish relatively rarely (just twice a week), and we’re not even technically a blog, it’s pretty awesome.
This month also marks the first where where I’m going to be moving the majority of newsletter writing work to others. I’ll still be editing and selecting stories, but my goal is to do less of the writing and focus more on other aspects of the business.
I’m really excited for the opportunity to focus on some Photojojo projects that have been in the slow cooker for a while now, as well as a couple non-Photojojo projects I’ve underway.
His latest project is Photojojo. If you like photography, you will like Photojojo.
Before Photojojo, he was a founder of The Daily Jolt, an online community on 100 college campuses, helped create a non-profit called ChangeThis with Seth Godin, and brought the technology un-conference BarCamp to NYC. He also started a weekly casual coworking session called Jelly.
And he's consulted for companies such as Pearson, Apple, and Creative Good and co-authored The Big Moo, a WSJ best-seller, with Seth Godin, Malcolm Gladwell, Guy Kawasaki, Tom Peters, and others.
Just a quick note — I’ll be speaking on a panel at PSFK’s San Francisco conference on July 17th, alongside Liz Dunn of FunnyOrDie and Jeremy Townsend of The Ghetto Gourmet.
JoshSpear.com, the the trend-spotting blog, 
Spread the word to your friends in South Asia, 
For those of you following the facebook buzz, Altura Ventures recently announced they’d formed a fund, AppFactory, that would invest solely in facebook platform apps, advising entrepreneurs from launch to traction to monetization to liquidity.
Facebook viral application growth continues to astound me. 
My friend Gil and I launched a facebook just under a week ago called the 
If you’re in NYC and working on a Facebook app (or want to be) come and chat with some likeminded folks next Wednesday at 7pm. Location TBD.
Photojojo turned 1 year old on April 1st and I’m pleased as punch to report that we’ve now surpassed 68,000 email and RSS subscribers to our 
