After three submissions, and two rejections, Event Connector was finally accepted into the directory. I was initially rejected for not having an icon, which was my fault, but the second rejection was for displaying secret events, which I never understood and filed a bug on. I didn’t make any changes to fix that, since I had no clue what they issue was, but I resubmitted it unchanged and this time it was approved!

I’ve started to get some more users through the listing, and had a really helpful conversation with Nikki Sullivan that led me to make changes to the UI. I added some links to reach the main page, with a sidebar icon for the app as well as a link in the title of the profile box. I love getting this sort of help, thanks Nikki!

I’m still unsure who’s going to be using the app. My initial plan was to target promoters, and have them spread the app as a flyer for a particular event. It looks like it’s more popular with guests so far, and they’re using it as a hub to view and investigate all their events. If that’s the direction my users are taking me, that suggests some extra features:

• A profile button that displays all the upcoming events someone is attending.
• List all the events that your friends are going to.
• A cleaner, more compact view of all the events.

This would take it in the direction of being a SuperEvent organizer, rather than the promotional tool I was imagining it to be. I’ll be thinking about this some more, and trying to understand how people are using it.

Funhouse Photo User Count: 1,154 total, 59 active. Much as before, I’ve made no changes in the last two weeks, and the growth rate remains the same.

Event Connector User Count: 27 total, 15 active. After its first day in the directory, it’s picked up a some users, though I haven’t seen it used to promote an event yet.

I stumbled into thinking about organizing conferences online by accident. I was looking for a way to see which of my friends were attending Defrag, there wasn’t anything out there that let me see that, and so I built a Facebook app to solve my problem.

That went down well, so I generalized it into Event Connector, and went looking for more events to try it on. I want to see if its simple services solve painful problems for guests and organizers, which types of events are the best fit, and build a relationship with some early-adopting event promoters to learn more about the market.

I’m also thinking about the folks over at EventVue. They’re building a much more advanced system, a suite of online tools to let conference organizers offer guests lots of interesting services. They’re a sharp team, just graduated from TechStars with an angel round under their belt, and we’ve chatted in the past about their work. I’d like to be able to back up any advice I offer them with some concrete data, and the only way to get that is to try a few things in the wild.

As an attendee, here’s my personal pain-points with conferences:

I don’t know who’s going. I usually end up bringing up conferences in conversations or emails with acquaintances in the runup to a show, but I don’t always remember, and I don’t ask everyone. Meeting old friends and connections is a big reason for going to conferences to me, so anything that increases my chances solves a big problem.

Nobody else knows I’m going. For both practical reasons, and yes, status reasons sometimes, it’s a benefit to me if I can advertise my attendance at a show. If I’m speaking, or doing something else prestigious there, I would like people to know that too. It’s even useful for past conferences, think of the strings of ribbons people wear to SIGGRAPH to demonstrate they’re old-timers.

It’s hard to organize informal get-togethers. Birds-of-a-feather sessions are usually the most valuable part of the show, but often it can be hard to arrange them, hear about them, and understand which are likely to be most useful.

Discussions finish at the end of a session. Of course, small groups usually peel off and continue chatting about ideas that came up from a presentation, but these are fragmented and there’s no process beyond arranging to start an email thread to continue them. I’d love to have a online area for each session where questions and discussions could go on past the conference.

Funhouse Photo User Count: 1,143 total, 60 active. Continuing the trend of gradual growth.

Event Connector User Count: 19 total. I reached out to a few prominent people in the tradeshow world like Rich Westerfield, Sue Pelletier and Tim Bourquin. Rich put up a blog post which was picked up by a few other blogs, and that’s helped boost my total. The directory submission is in the queue again. My goal is to get at least one more event using a connector within the next week.

It’s really important to collect a few important statistics to measure a project’s progress. One of my goals is to create an app that has over 25,000 users, an arbitrary number but one that’s high enough to use as evidence that it appeals to people outside the early-adopter geek crowd.

I’ve been collecting daily statistics since I launched Funhouse Photo, and I wanted to do analysis on them. At the top is a static image of the graph I created using Google Spreadsheets, and I’ve included a live link below. I’d never used the Google office products before, and I was pleasantly surprised. They’ve done a good job replicating the usability of a desktop app on the web. Unfortunately my OS X Firefox 2.0.4 wouldn’t display the graphs correctly, and neither would Safari. Luckily, if strangely, FF 2.0.4 on Vista did work, so I was able to complete the job using that.

Visualizing the data immediately gave me two important insights:

1. There’s a knee in the total user curve, and that corresponds to my introduction of asynchronous image loading. This is strong evidence that it’s something that puts users off using the app, and so makes improving that seem important.
2. It’s hard to see any other changes in the adoption curve’s slope. This means that all the other upgrades I’ve done to the app haven’t had an impact. Adding more effects, including notifications in user’s feeds and the profile button all failed to increase adoption. Getting a positive review didn’t result in more users.

Facebook recently introduced a "More Stats" option for all apps. This gives you access to a lot more information about the number of adds and removes, as well as a sample of the actual urls people are visiting. There’s no way to download the history, so for now I’ll keep manually entering them every day.

Funhouse Photo User Count: 1142 total, 74 active. Still the same slow growth trend. Extrapolating, the entire planet should be using the app in around 411,000 years.

Event Connector User Count: 11 total. I’m still waiting to hear back on the bug I filed about secret events, and on my resubmission to the directory, but I am talking directly to some event organizers about trying it with their meetings.

The best place to start learning about using JavaScript within Facebook apps is the developer wiki. It can be a bit disorienting at first, because they’ve constructed a very effective security sandbox. The only calls you can make are those they explicitly provide, so many common calls like alert() are not available.

There’s no list of all the legal function calls you can make, though the wiki does cover the DOM element calls. I’ve put in a request to the Facebook team to document the whitelist they use to parse scripts, but for now you need to use trial and error to find out which are filtered out. Some are obvious, anything that would let you add arbitrary unchecked content to the page, like document.write or eval(), are never going to be supported.

I had to write a script blocker for SearchMash, so I know how tough it can be. I’m very impressed with the job they do, managing to identify variables within JS and put them in a private namespace by adding a prefix is very clever. I do wonder if anyone’s gone through the full Cross-Site Scripting Cheatsheet though, since there are some funky methods of concealing scripts within html, and even after a few weeks of work I wasn’t able to exclude all of them. I had to deal with arbitrary external pages, so maybe Facebook can avoid those issues by refusing to parse anything that looks even slightly odd, since most of the exploits rely on ill-formed markup that still works in many browsers.

One of the interesting restrictions they have is that scripts in profile boxes will only be run as the result of a user action. This is a nice balance between allowing the app to do interactive things on the profile, but keeping the app from annoying the user when they’re not interested in it.

I’ve already done a big post on Facebook’s MockAjax, but a lot of the same points apply to general FBJS development. You’ll want to get FireBug to help you debug, and expect to spend a lot of time looking at the actual source of the pages Facebook is giving you. Luckily, if you’re the developer they include the FBML before it was processed by their parser, in comments towards the top of the page. This can be a real life-saver when you’re trying to work out what went wrong.

Funhouse Photo User Count: 1124 total, 104 active. Another day of steady growth. I’m going to see if I can chart the statistics I’ve been gathering here, but I’m pretty sure it’s been almost linear since I launched.

Event Connector User Count: 9 total. Still need to research what they mean by ‘secret’ events, and how to exclude them, and then I can do another directory submission.