I’ve had a great response from Defrag attendees to the Connector. Eric sent out a message and put up a blog post, and Brad Feld and Jeff Nolan both had good things to say about it on their blogs. I’m very proud to see some of the people I read daily giving it a thumbs-up.

The app has 95 users, even though there’s only 63 confirmed guests at the event, which is interesting! I wrote it in a generic way, so it will work with any Facebook event if you supply the id in the URL parameters, and it will pull the attendee information, name and logo from the API. I will see about putting up another app that’s not restricted to Defrag, using the same code with some UI added to let you pick and event.

Defrag is going to be a lot of fun. Liz will be joining me after the conference, and we’ll be exploring Colorado for the rest of the week, since neither of us have been before. Liz’s cousin used to live there, and recommended a road-trip, staying in Boulder and then doing a loop through the mountains. It’s a shame we won’t be bringing our mountain bikes, but hopefully we can manage some cross-country skiing and hiking.

Funhouse Photo User Count: 903 total, 57 active daily. Still the same slow growth pattern of the last week. I won’t be making any changes this weekend, since I want to concentrate on some of my other projects.

I finished off Defrag Connector. You can now search for friends who are going, any mutual friends you share with those attending, and add a button to your profile.

It’s all unofficial at the moment, but I’m checking with Eric Norlin to make sure he’s ok with me publicizing it a bit more. I wrote it to scratch an itch, but I think it could be handy for other attendees too.

Technically, it wasn’t too hard. The biggest hurdle was doing the mutual friends check, since the Facebook API doesn’t offer a direct method for that. Instead, I’m checking every attendee against every friend of the current user, one attendee at a time. This needs an API call per attendee, so it can take many seconds. Since Facebook will show an error screen if you take too long returning a page, I had to implement an ajax callbacks to deal with a few attendees at a time, and update the page. It’s the same technique I used for to solve Funhouse Photo’s loading time problems. It works well with my few dozen friends, I hope it will scale to some of the monster friend counts some of the attendees have!

I also discovered that you can’t add images directly hosted by facebook to the user’s profile, so instead I had to automatically copy the logo onto my server, and then link to my copy.

One nice bonus of creating this was hearing from Rob Johnson of EventVue, a tech stars company that’s got some great ideas on how to create kick-ass conference networking tools. It’s great to see how many good companies are emerging from the program. Rob told me the secret was how clued-in and involved their mentors are. I’m looking forward to continuing the conversation over a beer at Defrag.

Funhouse Photo User Count: 871 total, 54 active. Still not showing any increase in the growth rate. I think my next step should be to add a lot more instrumentation to the app, so I can tell how people are using it, and try to identify parts of the user experience that aren’t clicking. Incidentally, the total now seems to be updated daily, like the active count. I miss the addictive thrill of seeing that tick up through the day!

I’ve got an initial version of Defrag Connector running. All it does is list your friends who are attending, next will be sorting out friends-of-friends which is a bit more challenging.

Funhouse Photo User Count: 856 total, 65 active. Not a big change from the trend over previous days, no sign of improvement from the recent changes yet.

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.