software.dev

Another day, another app!

Where Should We Eat?
This one is called, ‘Where Should We Eat?’.  The basic premise is to address the problem of just that.  How many times have you gone out to eat with friends & family, and no one wanted to pick a place.  With the click of a button, you can easily find a random restaurant nearby.

I got to use the Yelp API and JSON for this, neither of which I’ve used before.  JSON was super easy to work with, thanks to PHP’s handy “json_decode()” function.

I doubt this app will get much adoption since you don’t need to add it like most apps, and it doesn’t have a viral component, but it was quick and easy to make, and actually pretty useful.  I’ve gotten positive feedback on it so far — give it a try!

Try the Mad-Libber on Facebook!

Been a LONG time since I wrote in this thing (nearly a year!) but I certainly haven’t been idle on the coding front.

Recently, I’ve been particularly interested building Facebook applications. It’s really an easy platform to develop for. Facebook provides great APIs and documentation, and you can bring pretty much whichever language you want to the table. The forums are also very active, with lots of helpful posters.

My first application, the Mad-Libber, is basically a Facebook version of the popular Mad-Libs game. For those of you who don’t know what that is, Mad-Libs are stories with blanks for certain words. The reader is given the type of word (noun, verb, adjective, etc… ) but not the context. The idea is that the reader supplies these words for the story and you read the result, obviously making no sense because the context isn’t known to the reader. That’s what makes it funny.

With my application, users can write these stories, complete stories their friends wrote, and share them with friends. I’m going to try and monetize this through ads, which is actually quite successful for many applications. Cubics, one of two ad networks I use (the other being Appsaholic) offers $0.50 per thousand impressions. If you could get 50,000 page views a day, that’d be about $25 /day or $750 a month. For an independent developer who does this as a hobby, that’s not too bad.

I’ve found that it can be really difficult to get traction for your application, however. A viral nature is a must. You look at the top apps for Facebook, like SuperPoke, Graffiti, etc… and all of them have a very viral component which makes them easy and fun for people to spread. Another thing to keep in mind is that it doesn’t matter which application comes out first, or which one is ‘better’, but what matters is that yours catches on.

If you have some time, give my application a try at: http://apps.facebook.com/madlibber. If any of you are interested in developing Facebook applications, I’d be glad to share my experiences and provide some advice. Just post here or email directly at ejfarraro@ucdavis.edu.

Thanks and happy coding