Tonight at the Graphing Social Patterns, 10 social applications gave demonstrations for the GSP West AppNite. The first six applications were Facebook Apps and the last four were Open Social applications.
Facebook Applications
Who Has the Biggest Brain
The first application during App Nite was the Facebook Game "Who Has the Biggest Brain" a game by the company Playfish. The concept behind the facebook application is a series of 4 minute games that lets you compare intelligence against your friends in Facebook. The game has 600k installs this week and 100k active users per day who play over 500k games per day. It's actually quite impressive that the average 'active user' is playing 5 games per day, especially when you consider according to the presenter it took 4 weeks to develop. It also doesn't require adding friends to be able to play the game (friend spam).
Just 3 Words
The next game was created by Scoob & Geko and is actually based on the parlor game where patrons would pass a paper around the bar each adding 3 words to a collective story. In this case, the application "Just 3 Words" has brought that game to Facebook. Interestingly, the average user spends 7 minutes per day on the site and a "statistically significant portion of the audience" spends more than 2 hours per day. So far over 60 thousand stories have been created across 3 million entries. All of the stories are licensed under creative commons.
Puzzle Messages
The next application "Puzzle Messages" was created by The Broth. The presenter admitted this was a very simple application, basically it allows users to create a jigsaw puzzle that encodes a message and send to the recipient who has to solve the puzzle to read the message.
Ski & Snowboard
The next application Ski & Snowboard is an application that allows Facebook users to identify, track and report on visits to ski resorts around the world. The application has a very nice map drive interface. There were two very interesting points from the demonstration. First, they came up with a really interesting (somehow feels less spamy) way to get users to invite their friends. They allow each user to state their skiing level, but requires 3 friends to confirm that level. The other interesting thing is that they actually started with 1000 resorts in their system, but through their users had about 200 more added and some of the geocoding corrected on the first 1000 resorts.
Dipity
Dipity is a startup focused on 'organizing the web using time.' In other words, they want to pull in data from Facebook. Currently 17,000 timelines have been created. At Graphing Social, they announced a new feature that allows their users to add other services' content streams to the timeline (such as Twitter Feeds.) Beyond creating personal timelines, users can create public pages on Facebook around other events such as this public page on the Federal Reserve.
Developer Analytics
The last presentation was by Developer Analytics. They have created a suite of tools for developers. These include a set of analytics for Facebook developers around revenue, virality and engagement. They also are displaying leader boards for the top applications and top ad networks. However, the thing I personally found most interesting (probably because I haven't created an app) is the fact they are also creating content - specifically case studies and interviews around Facebook applications.
Open Social Apps
Know Your Neighbor
The Know Your Neighbor app was positioned as "Twitter for your community & neighbors ... on steriods." Basically, the idea is that users can organize their friends list based on geographic location. Currently the version demonstrated automatically picks the most 10 closest friends, but when this launches it will let users pick how many users they want to group together. Then they can post messages to groups of friends. While this application is clearly very rough, I have already predicted hyperlocal will be a big theme in 2008 and it would be great to see some social apps try to tap into this.
Living Social
Hungary Machine presented next on their application Reading Social, which seems to have evolved from their Facebook app Visual Bookshelf. Bsically, the book allows user of a social network to share their reviews on books they read but now it works across social networks. Interestingly, they have more book reviews than Amazon today. They have also created a number of similar applications -- Drinking Social for Beer, Dining Social for restaurants, and Tune Social for music.
Trip Wiser
Trip Wiser is an application that works across social networks to discover things to do. The basic idea is that they have developed a 8 question compatibility quiz to try and determine your travel preferences. Once filling this out you can review different places you've visited and get recommendations of new places to visit. Currently, they have about 400 thousand locations reviewed across their network.
Chirp Screen
The final presentation of App Nite was Chirp Screen an interactive screen saver that shows activity across sites like Flickr, Facebook and Twitter. It also allows users to link back or post comments. Unfortunately, the screen saver only works in Windows right now but a OS/X version is on the way.
Conclusion
And the winner is .... First place - Developer Analytics, Second Place - LivingSocial , and third place Chirp.
