We’ve been busy but still alive! It’s been a hectic past 2 months – not only have we moved to SF but we’ve been travelling quite a bit as well. We got invited to speak at all three Social Media Buiness School events in LA, NYC, and London and will be heading up to Las Vegas next (Offerpal Media’s Master Developers Conference) and Casual Connect in Seattle later this month.
We’re working on a new product that we will be launching soon!
Social Media Business School Events
We had a great time at InterPlay last Thursday! Special Thanks to Bret Terrill for inviting us 
Check out the first 25 minutes of our keynote here.
Brief Summary:
To focus the discussion, we introduced this metric in viewing social games.
- We’ll be speaking on June 5th at the Social Media Business School event in LA. Don’t worry – we never give the same talk twice. New insights everytime.
- We’ll be relocating to San Francisco!
- Yes, per the Q&A discussion at Interplay, we are working on something big and an extension of dA to be released in the upcoming months. Stay tuned for the details
Hey folks, we’re still alive, we promise ;p We’ve been working hard and seeing some very interesting trends emerging…
Just a heads up for everyone in the bay area this week: we’ll be at InterPlay: The Business of Games on the Social Web this Thursday, May 22nd in San Francisco. We will be revealing some of our newest discoveries on the platform and social gaming vertical, so hope to see you all there!
We just got back from Google Campfire One, where Googlers presented and demoed the preview release of the awesome Google App Engine (See Techcrunch coverage). Many thanks to our friends who managed to give us invitations to this event!
We keep forgetting to take pictures, but luckily we remembered this time
Here are some pictures (courtesy of Charles’ iPhone):
The Crowd: all wrapped up in blankets because it was *freezing* out
Charles and Jing: happy with our hot cocoa and marshmallows
Richard: priceless expression
Richard and Charles: Smile at the camera guys
Jing: SMILE!
Guido van Rossum: the guy who invented Python ;p
We spoke on the analytics panel at the SocialMedia Business School event last week in SF. It was a smaller, close-knit crowd, but there were some great discussions ranging from analytics to brand advertising. Check out this blog post for a summary of notes.
Just wanted to re-highlight a few key points we touched on in this panel:
At dA, we like to think about traditional “frameworks” in novel ways. In this case, what if you took the “Referral” stage and moved it forward — even before a user is activated? This is essentially what “forced invite” apps on Facebook do, and it’s why they “work.” By doing this, these apps maximize the number of the friends each user touches. Once this stage is maximized, each proceeding stage (retention, for instance) is maximized as well. The more friends that are referred, the more there are to be engaged.
Of course, forced invite apps are no longer permitted on Facebook. Even still, for the new era of apps, moving referral ahead of retention is still a highly effective technique.
It’s been really busy here at dA.
Where We’ve Been
We gave a quick demo of our upcoming analytics suite at the Bay Area Developer Meetup last March 19th hosted at AOL and received great response. Since then, we also had a great time hearing some excellent speakers and panels at Snap Summit 2.0 on March 25th in San Francisco.
Where We’re Headed
Direct measurement analytics tools (in private beta, public beta in upcoming weeks) for developers! We will be releasing our analytics tools on our website in the upcoming weeks, so developers can monitor the health and growth of their apps. And yes, we are developers ourselves, so we keep up with changes to the platforms. If you are around the SF area, we’ll be speaking more on analytics/metrics and best practices at SocialMedia’s Business School this coming Thursday, April 3rd.
New Interview
We interviewed Justin Smith, Product Manager of Watercooler, a while back, so check out the interview for the story on how their TV and sports apps started. Oh, Justin also writes an terrific blog at InsideFacebook.com, so hit that up too
Last Tuesday, Wayne Mak (developer of Nicknames) stopped by Berkeley, and we managed to catch him and have a great conversation — not just about Nicknames but about entrepreneurship in general.
– What are the motivations of Facebook application developers?
- What makes them stay up and work around the clock?
Check out our app case study for more regarding what motivates Wayne and his thoughts about this space.
Last week, we Skyped our way to India to speak with Rajat Agarwalla of Scrabulous. Rajat and Jayant have turned their email version of Scrabulous.com into a very engaging, Facebook game, capturing a large fanbase. They’ve spent a great deal of time on building a strong user community and listening to feedback. For more details behind the Scrabulous story, check out our Scrabulous case study.
In our interview, Rajat shared some of his thoughts on analytics pertaining to the Facebook space.
“Well, in the Facebook space, the number of installs isn’t really that meaningful. Instead, we really track app activity, such as return usage. In fact, even metrics measured on a daily basis really aren’t that useful.”
Bingo! The insight we’ve gathered from testing our own analytics suite at dA has showed very cyclical patterns. That’s why at dA, we are working on changing the way we typically “view” Facebook applications.
Even “daily active users” is not meaningful enough. Because of the viral nature of apps, most daily active users could just be “new” users rather than returning. Our direct measurement analytics tool will be focusing on social networking-specific metrics like virality (”k factor” – for each user, the number of new users resulting from that user) and engagement (return usage). Over the next couple of weeks, we will be sharing more details on this so stay tuned!
We just came back from O’Reilly’s Graphing Social Patterns West down in San Diego where we were invited to present Developer Analytics at AppNite. We arrived at 6:20pm (demos starting at 7:00pm), and the cab driver told us the hotel was 100 miles away from the airport. Fortunately, we phoned up Dave McClure, and he assured us that it was only 10 minutes away (crazy cab driver!). So, we got to present, and by popular vote, we actually won first place in the “Facebook” category, bringing home a very cool prize: MacBook Air etched with social graph. Special thanks to Dave McClure for getting us down there in time and all who were part of the AppNite selection committee and voted for us !
We met some amazing folks at the conference and heard some awesome panels. Andrew Chen has a great summary post on some of the key takeways from the conference.
Go check it out!
PS: Fritz Nelson from InformationWeek also did a video interview of us.
At dA, the developers we’ve met and interviewed have never ceased to amaze us. Granted, all these developers have taken varying approaches in succeeding on the Facebook platform. We just wanted to give a shout out and congratulations to Ankur Nagpal for his recent feature in BusinessWeek. Ankur, a 19-year-old sophomore at UC Berkeley has made over six figures, creating over 70 personality quizzes for Facebook. Ankur has taken a simple, lightweight model of viral success and replicated that over and over, succeeding with tactics such as cross promotion of apps. We have observed similar strategies pursued by the “versus” game-like apps as well.
Mad props to Ankur and his ability to execute (while being a student)!
