How does that happen?

August 23rd i work up with a question on the about page of this site from Sarah Perez. Sarah wanted to know my name, i hesitantly answered, however I’m glad I did. Sarah turned out to be the writer from TechCrunch who decided to write about my application. I still have no idea how Sarah found out about the application. If you’re out there Sarah, tell us!

I had launched this application a few times, the first time I launched the application it was fairly quickly banned by Facebook. After a few changes, i re-launched it. Again Facebook decided they didn’t like it, but not before TechCrunch decided they liked it.

What happens when it happens?

Again a very simple answer: Your servers get pounded. Imagine the fattest person you know, having intercourse with the skinniest person you know. Its that kind of situation…

As you can see things were going well for me (The red line indicates total # of users). This is a graph i generated daily showing the usage stats of the application. The massive spike at the end, thats what happens when TechCrunch decides to feature you.

We have seen that Like, Recommend and Share buttons seem to…suck? A good like button will get something like 1% of your customers click it, maybe 10% if you’re doing something special. I don’t know about you, but I’m yet to see any money from people who have liked my pages. Wouldn’t it be better if you could say something like:

Hi <<Friend>> I think you should really buy a new phone from Samsung, I’m going to!

<<link to product>>

Cheers,

Andrew

We all spend a lot of money trying to target our customers in the right way, why not target their friends in the right way! They are probably pretty similar and very likely to buy the same products as each other.

To help with this we have created is our Beta Friends API. Its free while in Beta and you can use it with just 3 pieces of data that you probably already have!

API Location: https://mouseofdoom.com/friendguess/request.php

GET Input:

• token (This is optional depending on the users privacy settings. A Facebook access token for that uid which has read_stream permission gives us a better chance of providing you good results.)
• uid (the UID of the facebook user who you are trying to get informtion about)
• request (For now this must be always set to “BF” as in “best friend”, more options to come!)

Returns:

• Response_type: “success” or “error”
• best_friends: array of friend ID’s and a associated weight (bigger the weight the better friends they are)
• quality_score: at the moment this always returns 0, soon it’ll returning a number rating from 1-10 (1 meaning a poor result, 10 meaning we’re confident these are good results)

Example:
https://mouseofdoom.com/friendguess/request.php?uid=609015520&token=<<AccessTokenRemoved>>&request=BF

The results (for my account…)

{“data”:{“response_type”:”success”,”best_friends”:{“1456609141″:3,”1389765098″:1,”509045714″:1,”733944965″:1,”534527836″:1,”759704262″:1,”535605429″:1,”814435174″:2,”508567480″:1,”511235773″:1,”634881216″:1,”786575359″:1},”quality_score”:0}}

What the hell does this mean to me? Well for starters it tells me that I have several people who are equally likely to be my best friend, with one who stands out (in terms of the highest weighting):

The stand out result is 1456609141. This is my father, not a bad result. We talk a lot, he values my opinion and would likely act on a recommendation i made.

The other results are also pretty decent:

• 1389765098 – my mother
• 509045714 – my girlfriend
• 535605429 – friend and business partner
• 786575359 – my business partners wife
• 733944965 – a member of my girlfriends family
• 534527836 – a co-worker and friend
• 814435174 – friend of my business partner
• 759704262 – an ex-co-worker and friend
• 508567480 – a co-worker who i talk to regularly
• 511235773 – a co-worker who i talk to sometimes
• 634881216 – a co-worker who i talk to sometimes

While this might look like a lot of results, its had to look through all 513 of my friends and return this select group. Its ignored old school friends who I don’t talk to (and live in Another country) and all the random people I’ve met in through various events who i never talk to (and probably don’t even remember who i am).

Why is this valuable? Well if you have not worked this out already, go away, or send me an email friendapi@fasttrackit.com.au and we can help you apply this to your online service

What does “Friend-watch” do? It…

• Tells you when someone becomes your friend
• Tells you when someone changes their name
• Shows a breakdown of males v’s females (and unknowns) in your friends list
• Tells you when someone is no longer on your friends list
• Shows you where your friends live on a map (coming soon…)

Facebook’s main concern was the way people were engaging with the app. Posts should be happy and create positive engagements, Facebook felt that our app didn’t do this, so we changed it up and made it happier and added some cool functions in the process of it.

So, join the fun. Join Friend-watch

After making some changes to become more “compliant” with Facebooks TOS I decided that I’d re-launch our “Who isnt my friend?” (now called “Friend-Watch“) application by simply adding it to my wall, and then doing nothing. Anyone who has followed this blog in the past knows that this app took off all by itself in the past, so it shouldnt be any surprise that I’d like to see if that happens again (if i do nothing to help it).

That was about 4 days ago now, so today I decided to measure my performance. In order to do this I created the following graphs:

• Engagement stats
  

• System performance

The Engatement stats are interesting because without me doing anything, they’re all pointed in the right direction…so i guess we can watch this one for a while longer and see what happens!

What interests me the most is the “System performance” graph. I was trying to answer the question “how do i know if i need more hardware?”. Previously when i wrote this app I had a massive issue with scale. I think that issue is pretty much resolved, but now i need to ask myself “how do i know when i need to scale it?” Thats where this graph came from.

I’ve drawn 3 key details on the “System performance” graph:

• Total audits – This shows how many audits the system has done as to date
• Total audits on day – This shows how many audits the system did on this day
• Total audits per user * 100 – This shows how many times each user was audited on average, multiplied by 100 to blow up any issues so they’re more easily seen

At first i just implemented “total audits” and “total audits on day”. I made the assumption that when i hit the servers limit i would see the “total audits on day” flat line. While i dont think this is an invalid assumption, it would take a few days for me to notice this…not cool. Then i had a better idea, i should measure how many times each user has been audited.

In general the way this application works is pretty simple. We check each users account once every 7 hours (ideally…) based on a queuing system. There are two “worker” processes, so I expect that ideally we should see around 10-12 audits per user per day (which is something like whats happening in reality), but whats most important from a “system health” type situation is that whatever the current level of “audits per user * 100″ is doesnt change too much from the previous day.

I’m sure there are a lot more details we can abstract out, but I just thought this was interesting and worthy of writing. Enjoy

At the end I had some cool features (which i didnt think were negative):

• Detect people who are no longer your friend
• Detect name changes
• Show breakdown of Males, Females and “Unknown” in someones friend list
• Show a users friend list on a map of the world (I was going to go for an affiliate deal here with some travel company and encourage people to visit their friends…)
• Detect users who block /unblock their friends – I Removed this feature as i felt it was a bit too negative
• Detect users who deactivate / reactivate – Also removed for the same reason as above

I’m a bit upset by this, but at the same time i got a lot out of the experience of creating this application, so i feel like i can let it slide (I should note i wrote some pretty nasty emails to Facebook before i came to this conclusion)

For those of you who care, here are the highlights:

• Discovered a lot of quirky Facebook API bugs, and how to work around them
• Managed to turn a process that collected names (at the end i had around 5 million unique names collected) which took over 5 days to refresh them all (for detecting name changes) into a process which could refresh every single name in under 2 hours
• Managed to scale the application such that it didn’t matter how many users started using the app, all I had to do was start up a new server and let the “worker” processes do their thing. They wouldnt get in each others way, they would just lock a user and keep going
• Learned a lot about advertising and monetizing a Facebook application (essentially, unless you have around 2000 daily returning users, don’t expect to make much more than $10 / day)
• and the big one…I managed to get my app to go viral

The day that i completed my major re-write of the back-end code of the app i started graphing the number of users who signed up each day. This was the end result!

http://apps.facebook.com/whoisntmyfriend

The reality is this app is hardly popular at all in the grand scheme of things, but for little old me its fun to know that people are using it…and that more people try to use it day over day without me pushing the point (thats a very strange feeling…)

This brings into mind a bunch of things i’ve never had to truly worry about:

• Scale – can my app handle this load? (Honestly no it cant, it’ll need a re-write)
• Can i make money from this? I had not intended to, but maybe its possible…anyone got any good affiliate recommendations?
• Am i breaking the Facebook terms and conditions (I think i am…) and if so, what does that really mean for me?

We’ll keep you posted on how this progresses, and also post an announcement when the re-write is complete. Peace out yo!

Essentially the idea is:

• You draw a picture
• Your picture is only one colour (a background with an inverse color for you to write with)
• Your picture gets used as a “Pixel” in a bigger picture
• The “Pixels” get reconstructed to build a larger image

Eventually if we get enough drawings the bigger picture will get revealed.

Also, you can buy your drawing on a T-Shirt for around $20.00. So draw something cool, shared it with your friends and wear it on a shirt!

Here are some example pictures people have uploaded…

• deletes you
• changes their name (this happens a lot..never noticed until i added the feature!)
• blocks you
• unblocks you
• deactivates their account
• reactivates their account
• adds you (not so helpful…but anyway)

A word of warning, it posts to your wall and will send you a daily email of the changes however you can turn these options on/off on the settings within the application. I won’t annoy you if i can help it

Check it out for yourself @ https://apps.facebook.com/whoisntmyfriend