I’m getting ready for the Defrag conference in November, and wanted to see which attendees were  friends, or even friends-of-friends. The organizer, Eric Norlin, has created a Facebook event, and a lot of the attendees have signed up.

In Facebook, the only way to interact with that information is by browsing an alphabetical list of the attendees. There’s no way to sort or filter them by their closeness in the social graph, or by shared networks.

This seems like an opportunity to build something better using the Facebook API. My goal is to create a simple application that lets me see attendees who I’m socially related to. That seems both technically straightforward and useful to other people who are either attending, or deciding whether to attend.

I’ll be spending my spare time putting that together, I’m hopeful it won’t take too long to get it functional. So far, I’ve added the application information to Facebook, and I’ve started with Funhouse Photo’s code as a template. The challenging bit is going to be efficiently querying the graph, since it will require a lot more database code than I’ve written before.

Funhouse Photo User Count: 839 total, 98 active. This is a nice increase in the total count, and the active users are up a bit. It’s too early to say if this is related to my changes or just noise, since they’ve been in for less than half a day, but it’s good to see nonetheless.