Social Networking @ ActiveState

Wow, what a fantastic month for us here at ActiveState. Eat-A-Rama went into beta at the beginning of the month and we’ve grown some 1800% in January. We’re pretty happy with that, but what we’re really happy with is the feedback we’ve been getting from users about Eat-A-Rama:

“…one of the cleanest, and most useful applications I have ever seen.”

“Some people I know asked me to give Eat-A-Rama a whirl… and I am extremely impressed.”

To celebrate the end of January and the start of longer days we’ve launched a set of new features for Eat-A-Rama:

Recommendations: See a restaurant your friend absolutely has to know about? Use the recommendations field and with a few simple clicks not only is your friend informed, they’ve got a clean, crisp link to a page full of reviews and details about it. They can thank you later (by taking out for lunch)!

We were thrilled by the response that Eat-A-Rama received at the Facebook Garage last night. Lots of good questions from the audience, too.

Phil Rees’s blog, Loosing Site, gives one viewer’s perspective of the event, and praises Eat-A-Rama’s “smooth and responsive interface.” We’re flattered.

Miss 604’s live blog nicely describes the evening’s activity.

Even more photos of the event, courtesy of Duane Storey, are posted on Flickr at http://www.flickr.com/photos/duanestorey/2226976921/in/set-72157603815156253/.

And we were very, very, thrilled to see Eat-A-Rama called

“one of the cleanest, and most useful applications I have ever seen”

by the blog Marketing Ruined My Life. Now we’re blushing.

ActiveState has been invited to present at the Vancouver Facebook Garage 2008. We’re thrilled to be invited.

We had a great time at the inaugural Vancouver Facebook Garage, where we first demo’d Up4. This time we’ll be featuring Eat-A-Rama and talking about some of our learnings in developing engaging experiences for social networks.

Come see us at the Facebook Garage on Monday, January 28, 2008 at the Vancouver Film School. All the details are here: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=6199866027.

Yep, that’s right. Eat-A-Rama now has over 250,000 restaurant listings throughout North America. For those of you who keep score, this means Eat-A-Rama has more restaurant listings than any other Facebook app.

And we (and our users) are still adding more. Lots more, all around the world.

How many restaurants are there in your own city? Give Eat-A-Rama a try. Check it out at http://apps.facebook.com/eat-a-rama/. Then let us know what you think on the Eat-A-Rama reviews page.

And while you’re there, rate a few of your favorite restaurants — and maybe discover a great place to eat!

We’re finally here. Eat-A-Rama is going live live

Of course, to 1,342 of you that’s old news.

All of us at ActiveState are really excited to launch Eat-A-Rama on the world stage after months of design, debate and discussion. With close to a quarter million restaurants in our DB around North America, we can truly say that Eat-A-Rama is the most comprehensive, and dare we say ‘fun’, restaurant discovery app on Facebook.

But decide for yourself, get Eat-A-Rama here and find the best, hottest (and coolest) restaurant in your hood: http://apps.facebook.com/eat-a-rama/

Oh, and we’re giving away $10,000 to local food banks in January ($1 for every 5 friends that a user gets to install Eat-A-Rama)… because while we’re really excited to help you find a great place to eat, we also know there are many who have a hard time for who just finding a meal is a struggle.

And now for the officialese:

Tap into Your Friends’ Favorite Restaurants with Eat-A-Rama on Facebook® Platform

New tool helps friends’ find great restaurants and $10,000 donation helps food banks nourish those in need

January 8, 2008 - ActiveState Software Inc., a Vancouver-based technology firm, released a new restaurant discovery application for the Facebook Platform called Eat-A-Rama. Building on social network users’ wealth of knowledge and opinions about where to eat and by letting friends act as personal restaurant advisors, Eat-A-Rama aims to make the world a tastier place.

ActiveState is celebrating the release of Eat-A-Rama with a food bank donation of up to $10,000; for every 10 friends a user invites to add Eat-A-Rama and who install the restaurant ranking application in January, ActiveState will donate $1 to the user’s local food bank.

With Eat-A-Rama, people can quickly discover new restaurants by browsing an interactive map or by searching with keywords. Adding restaurant ratings is an easy and fun process using thumbs up/down buttons and people are immediately rewarded with an updated restaurant score. With Eat-A-Rama, each person has a unique experience based on the ratings of their network of friends. Where a restaurant may be highest ranked for one person, it could be at the bottom for someone else because their friends rated it lower. A general community score for each restaurant is also available.

From $5 finds to 5-star eateries, Eat-A-Rama covers more restaurants in each city than any other restaurant site or app. Eat-A-Rama currently includes more than 100,000 restaurants in the following North American cities: Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, Toronto, and Vancouver. Restaurant profiles for new cities will be added weekly with a goal of complete North American coverage.

“We were frustrated that most online info about restaurants is out of date, obviously sponsored or the opinion of some food critic that is hard to relate to. But friends always have a wealth of information on where to go, where not to go and the latest hot spots or best kept secrets,” said Sebastian Troen of ActiveState’s Social Networking Team. “Eat-A-Rama unlocks this potential by combining social networking with all the great stuff friends know about where to eat.”

“ActiveState is quickly becoming a leader in social networking technologies with applications that provide real utility to real users,” said Bart Copeland, CEO of ActiveState.

In September, Up4, an app that helps friends spend more time together offline was launched to rave reviews, such as “the best looking app on Facebook.”

“Eat-A-Rama is another example of how ActiveState is fulfilling the potential of social networking to make technology that just works,” added Copeland. “I am really excited to start checking out all the great places to eat around here with Eat-A-Rama.”

Eat-A-Rama can be found and installed from the Facebook applications directory (or at http://apps.facebook.com/eat-a-rama/) in the Utility and Food and Drink categories.

About Eat-A-Rama

Eat-A-Rama helps people discover new restaurants based on the knowledge and opinions of their social network. Restaurant ratings are based on the input of each person’s friends meaning that every Eat-A-Rama user has a unique experience. Currently in beta, Eat-A-Rama supports North American cities with over 250,000 restaurant profiles.

About ActiveState

ActiveState creates professional software development tools, programming language distributions and business solutions for dynamic languages, and practical tools and applications for social networking platforms. ActiveState solves complex problems and produces cool and useful applications that help people live more productive and enjoyable lives. ActiveState technology “just works”. ActiveState is owned by its employees and Pender Financial Group, a publicly traded investment company focused on technology in British Columbia. For more information, visit www.activestate.com.

Enter Eat-A-Rama, the latest app from the Social Networking Group at ActiveState. We’ve been hard at work at designing and developing this app since October and it’s finally out in public alpha, which is why i’m giving you this ’sneak peek’.

We are opening the doors for real users to help us test Eat-A-Rama ahead of its launch in the new year. So if you’re constantly trying to figure out where to go for breakfast, lunch or dinner, and more importantly, if you care about your friends’ opinions or have some of your own, then we definitely invite you to give Eat-A-Rama a try. The basic idea is that for most of us, we have lots of really valuable and interesting information about where’s good, where’s definitely not good and where’s the hot spot in town. Getting at that information is usually the trouble and we end up having lots of conversations on street corners about where to go.

Hungry? Heard enough? Check out Eat-A-Rama here: http://apps.facebook.com/eat-a-rama/

By the end of the week we wil have data for most major cities in Canada uploaded to the database and by launch we’ll be supporting most of North America. If your city is not supported, drop us a line and we’ll have a look at adding the data asap.

And we are very interested in hearing your feedback. You can drop us a line at the Eat-A-Rama page found here: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=7557917790

As we’ve previously mentioned on this blog, we’re really focused on delivering real utility to real users. Eat-A-Rama is a great example of what we mean. Eating is a social experience and building on the social graph to allow for unique experiences to end users based on the social input of a person’s network is the promise that social networking is slowly beginning to deliver on. Solely focusing on the built-in viral growth of social network platforms is short-sighted and I predict a gradual change will start occuring over the next year towards apps that harness the power of the social graph for more than virality. We’re excited to have Eat-A-Rama and our first application, Up4, leading the way.

Today the ActiveState Komodo Team launched an extension to Komodo that allows support for the published OpenSocial extensions. Great timing I would say since we’re also busy looking at OpenSocial here in the Social Networking Team. Ah synergy, how sweet thee are

Though our two apps are currently deployed only on the Facebook platform, we’re keeping a close eye on OpenSocial to see how best to roll out Up4, Eat-A-Rama and future apps across as many relevant social networks as possible. It definitely helps having the leading web development tool offer downloadable extensions (it doesn’t hurt to have the developers next door, either).

Check out the downloadable extension here and the official press release here.

Take a glance at the top Facebook apps and you’ll find tons of fun stuff. FunWall, SuperPoke, Scrabulous, and Hot or Not are but a few goodies. Peek at your friends’ Profiles, and (if your friends are like most), you’ll see vampires, zombies, and food fights galore.

The recent update to the O’Reilly report on The Facebook Application Platform backs this up. The top categories? It’s all fun and games:

• Dating
• Messaging
• Video
• Chat
• Just for Fun
• Gaming

On Asi Sharabi’s No Man’s Blog, his Facebook Applications Trends Report #1 provides an excellent analysis of this fun-focused phenomenon. In his unique categorization scheme, apps focusing on Identity Formation (“this is me” apps like Cities I’ve Visited or Your Stripper Name), “Phatic Communication” (minimal-content communication such as pokes, zombies, and virtual gifts), and Games make up 88% of the top 200 applications.

Given the current popularity of Facebook apps focusing on fun, you can probably guess O’Reilly’s ranking of the bottom Facebook categories:

• Politics
• Utility
• Sports
• Money
• Business
• Classified

It seems if you’re on Facebook looking to do something useful with your online friends,you may be looking in the wrong place. Yet that’s exactly where we’ve launched ActiveState’s first social app, Up4 — in the Utility category.

But are applications for social networks necessarily about trivial interactions? Or is this focus on fun purely a Facebook phenomenon?

Let’s look at apps for other social networking platforms – especially those that support the OpenSocial platform:

Here’s the tag cloud for the user-created social networks hosted on Ning:

Sure, Fun and Games make a showing. But Art? Business? Education? Doesn’t look like Facebook territory here.

LinkedIn and Plaxo made their names by studiously hewing to a professional, just-for-business track. No Zombies here.

And look at the Google Gadgets —the first apps available as OpenSocial applications. The biggest category here is Tools, though Fun & Games comes in as the third largest category after Lifestyle.

Google Gadgets, by and large, weren’t built with social networks in mind. True to their name, most of the Gadgets are quite trivial, providing simple content aggregation and display of some sort (stock tickers, weather reports, RSS feeds, etc.), with little value added to the content—either by the app or the social network.

Comparing the current crop of Google Gadgets with Facebook Apps, we seem to have a pair of opposites.

• On Facebook, truly social apps that provide little utility.
• On OpenSocial, Google Gadgets that provide basic utility but little social interaction.

Is there a need for social applications that are truly useful?

Is this Facebook fixation on more frivolous apps a temporary phenomenon? Will users get food-fight fatigue, and move on to more useful interactions?

Or are some social networks, by their nature or focus, more appropriate for useful applications than others?

What do you think?

We’ve recently seen a spike in Up4 growth that has both been pleasing and mysterious. We made some minor changes and next thing invitations are way up and we’re seeing a quadrupling of growth rates. All good stuff.

One reason could be that we’ve seen an increase in users from the UK and Australia, particularly the UK. Their bounce rates are half those of our North American users. So now we’re left wondering why Up4 is so popular in the UK. Are Brits more sociable, more tech savvy (willing to move up from the ol’ email/phone combo), is the high cost of telephone service making Up4 more desirable, a combination of the above?

The challenge in this environment is trying to guide your ship pretty much blind. Sure you can put in some analytics, you can look at the data behaviour of the users that use your application, but there’s no comprehensive tool out there (that I’ve seen anyway) that does a good job of answering questions about your app’s behaviour: why is the growth happening now, where’s the real growth coming from, how much of it is viral and how much of it is tied to blog posts or media coverage? There’s an opportunity out there for an entirely new type of analytics, Socialytics? (Actually that URL is already taken by a company that’s trying to take analytics and make it a social experience. Not what I’m talking about here.)

I see a lot of opportunity in the space in figuring out ways to help developers make money, so whoever figures out a way to tie everything together: the viral impact, the blog posts, the code changes, etc., into a system that can pinpoint behavioural changes to specific things, well, that could be a tool that a lot of people, including myself, could be interested in.

PS - Stay tuned for a sneak peek at our next app, Eat-A-Rama, in the next few days…

There’s a number of articles floating around talking about the possible moves of Yahoo! and Google to build social networks around your existing email accounts (most of this has been covered before).  It’s something we’ve been talking about here as well, as the consequence of joining various social networks (and maintaining multiple email accounts) is often the fragmentation of your contacts.

On one hand, there’s an opportunity to harmonize your contacts across all the mediums that you use for communication.  But really, isn’t that just making more work for users to keep their contacts organized.  Or, the email platforms themselves can recognize the opportunity of integrating their closed systems with the ’social net’.  Who wouldn’t rather have their Gmail or Yahoo! contacts list act as the central location for their social and business networks?!  I’m going to be following the evolution of OpenSocial and in particular, Gmail and Yahoo! Mail’s use of it very closely.

Perhaps this makes our good friend, David Ascher’s, new venture with MailCo a social networking play after all. Now that would be pretty funny

And now, some obligatory links to read more:

Don Dodge - Email Contacts - The Natural Social Network
The Social Times - Email Becomes Center of Social Networks?

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