Monthly Archive for March, 2008Page 2 of 2

A Tale of Two Facebook Apps: Viral Vs. Non-Viral Growth

Published
by
Hung
on March 8, 2008
in Code, Facebook, School and Social Network
. 0 Comments

For my SI 508 Networks class last semester I did an analysis of one of my Facebook applications, Notecentric. Notecentric was a social network that I had written during the Summer of ‘06 and I had recently ported it to the Facebook Developer Platform in Summer ‘07 shortly after the platform had been launched.

The growth of Notecentric isn’t what I had hoped it would be. Not too many people use it, probably due to network effects of Facebook promoting a competing app (note to Facebook: if you want to promote a level playing field, don’t play favorites!) and other general performance issues (the application is pretty barebones and the RFacebook library I used to write it is pretty damn slow. It times out a lot!).

Anyway, I got some neat network data from it, which made the whole thing worthwhile. You can check out the original paper I wrote last semester here.

I’m going to be presenting my analysis during the School of Information’s annual expoSItion. It’s like a science fair except without the exploding volcanoes. During my Winter break, I developed another app, mainly for fun. It’s called Musical Instruments. Basically it lets you list which instruments you play and see which instruments your friends play. I had somewhat higher hopes for this application as a data gathering tool, and sure enough, it seems to be doing some cool stuff on first analysis. For expoSItion I figured I’d grab some data from this new app and compare the two.

I ran some initial analysis on the Musical Instruments app. I won’t go over a lot of the original metrics I used (number of peers with app installed, percentage of peers with app installed, etc) and I’ll just skip to the pictures.

This is an initial view of the Notecentric network:

notecentric_far_small.jpg

Continue reading ‘A Tale of Two Facebook Apps: Viral Vs. Non-Viral Growth’

Fire Eagle Invite Get!

Published
by
Hung
on March 6, 2008
in Code
. 9 Comments

fireeagle_logo_final.png

Thanks to LordElph, I got an invite to Yahoo’s newest thing, Fire Eagle. I feel as though there’s enough fire stuff in the world with Firefox and its eternal enemy, Firedog. But oh well.

Fire Eagle is a centralized location information service, basically. You can use its built-in APIs to set user location information and grab user information from it (assuming you have the correct permissions).

This is cool because in the past, applications have had to do this location stuff on their own. For example, if I wanted to set up a Twitter clone that knew a user’s location, I’d have to be able to take the information and process it, and retrieve it later. Fire Eagle handles a lot of stuff like figuring out exactly where a user when things might be ambiguous (I typed in “University of Michigan” and it gave me a choice between the main campus and the Dearborn one).

I’m planning on coding up some location aware applications at some point soon, so I think it’ll be fun to try and see what I can do with the help of this Fire Eagle thing. Yahoo has definitely done something unique and I give them some props for working on this service!