SEO Girl

facebook Developers Garage Tel Aviv – Overview

I’ve participated today in the Israel developers garage meetup in the Interdisciplinary center (IDC) Herzelya. The facebook Garage Meetup is being held in many cities all over the world,even in Africa.

The event was initiated by the.co.ils and included a presentation of Nethanel Yaacobson (BizDev director) at facebook, Eyal Magen from Gigya and Alon Carmel from Devunity (both invested by Benchmark Capitals, who also attended this event).

facebook launched the facebook Platform on May 24, 2007 and enabled many developers to participate in building this tremendous social empire. facebook also launched at that time the Facebook Markup Language. The numbers of applications has reached to 33,000 by July, 2008.

Nethan from facebook described the accelerating success of the user created applications in facebook is overwhelming for facebook.  He noted that facebook developed only four(!) of the applications by herself, and all the other applications were created by users. Today there are over 650,000 developers and over 52,000 applications in facebook.

What does facebook do for the developers?

facebook is now funding various applications and helps them to grow and distribute themselves – Therefore it offers the “fbFund“.They  have recently funded 5 new applications including weddingbook, GroupCard and KontaGent.

facebook also offers a new verification service that aims to evaluate the applications and define some standards.  The user experience is very important to facebook and also there were many “spam applications “over the last period.

Nethan also mentioned that facebook has a new partnership with the enterprise platform force.com. This collaboration creates the ability to create social enterprise applications – sounds promising..!

All about facebook Connect

facebook introduces the facebook Connect -  This feature enables facebook users to bring with them their facebook friends network everywhere they go on the web, even on third party sites. So basically the idea is that you carry your social data with you but you can control who will access to this precious knowledge and how much access it will provide.

The target is to map social connections everywhere – You can link between your Digg account and your facebook account and find who among your facebook friends have a Digg account and reach them through Digg. This feature actually saves time filling many registration form for sites – You identity is shared, and therefore you can log in to many third party sites with your facebook user and password.

Nana10, a leading Israeli portal, announced lately that the site will fully integrate facebook connect. This is very impressive and shows that there are lots of hopes hanging on this feature.

Sounds Great… But what’s your business model?

Thinking of a great idea for a facebook application is easy, bringing many people is pretty hard but the business model is the hardest part without a doubt. Many of the applications developers today are young entrepreneurs, who knows how to program really well but don’t understand how to build a proper business model.  Many of the application developers place affiliate links and advertisement in order to take advantage of the amazing amounts of people who use their application – but this is obviously not enough. Also, every caprice of facebook can change th

eir whole business model. There is no doubt that this is one of the biggest challenges of this audience, and it is not clear if facebook is going to find the solution for this (considering the fact that facebook’s own business model is still unclear).

After the facebook presentation Eyal Magen from Gigya (the gadget network) and Alon Carmel from Devunity (social collaborating coding platform) also introduced themselves and their promising start ups with very interesting presentations.  Also saw there Orli Yakuel from Go2Web2.0 and Ayelet Noff (also known as Orli Yakuel from Go2Web2.0 and Ayelet Noff (also known as Blonde 2.0). It was great to finally see them, maybe next time I’ll stay to the pizza and beers networking time and talk to them…

Good night