We just visited NIT Durgapur, one of the best Engineering schools in India for recruitments, and hired six very bright engineers. We are very excited by the activities in the social network applications domain, and are gearing up to be ready for the opportunities, challenges, difficulties and tribulations, all of which we estimate to follow an exponentially rising curve.

It was great interacting with bright young people who are going to start their careers. It was heartening to know that they all yearn for opportunities other than those offered by the large process driven IT companies in India which don’t leave much scope for technical or personal heroism. The young want to be heroes. They just need the right opportunities.

We’re eagerly looking for the fresh graduates to join us. We’re sure they’ll bring with them a breath of fresh air and lots of enthusiasm, and accelerate our growth.

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We think Dialog Boxes are the most underused among features provided to developers by the Facebook Developers Platform. We find that Dialog Boxes, if used, are used mainly for issuing alert messages on User Actions. While it is very reasonable to use Dialog Boxes that way, there’s a lot more Dialog Boxes can do.

Dialog Boxes are a very good way of taking user input, validating it, and submitting it to the server without having the user navigate away from the page where he performed the action that opened up the Dialog Box. This keeps navigation, simple, compact and very very intuitive. Have a look at the use of Dialog Boxes we’ve made in iAspire. We use Dialog Boxes for almost all user actions where the user needs to enter any additional input after having taken the action.

We recently had a requirement from one of our clients to build a fairly complex dialog box that was a complete menu system that would allow the user to navigate a list of objects arranged as a tree, read details about them which would pop up in boxes inside the Dialog Box, and finally, purchase or add one of them to some sort of a cart. We thought it would be just about impossible to do it with a Facebook Dialog Box, but thought we should try a few it out. And know what, its all possible from inside a Dialog Box!

We’ll post the link to the application when we have released it, and a few tips/caveats/gotchas too. Till then, have a look at the documentation .

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We haven’t found anything with the Facebook Developer’s platform to be as intriguing as Templatized Feeds. Templatized Feeds were released by Facebook with an assurance that Feeds which are properly constructed would also land up in the News Feed of those friends of the user who sent out the feed who haven’t installed the application. Now that creates a great viral possibility, and we are among the many developers who went ahead and took the pain to modify their feeds to suit the Feed Template formats.

But with no results. We haven’t yet seen our Feeds landing up on non-application users’ News Feeds. We investigated into this, and here’s what we think is critical ot successfully publishing Templatized Feeds to a large number of users on Facebook:

1. Possibility of Aggregation: The TitleTemplate and BodyTemplate fields of the feed must be simple to aid aggregation. Best practice is to have everything other than the {active} parameter in the feed unchanged from feed to feed. The {target} field should not be used, as it reduces the possibility of aggregation.

2. Links: All links in the feed should be accessible to the viewer of the feed without having to add the application. Facebook analyzes the click-stream of the user once he clicks on any of the links in the feed, and records it if installation of the application is needed to view the content behind the link. Forcing an install from any of the links would put the Feed into Facebook’s bad books.

3. Quality of Content: All links in the Feed must point to pages which are relevant to the content of the feed. This means linking everything to the About page of the application might not help. This implies developers might have to put in a good amount of effort into making some pages from their applications viewable without the user having to add the application. Many leading applications seem to have done this, and we’ve done it for iAspire too here.

There’s no guarantee even after you’ve done all the above that your feeds would land into the News Feed of non application users. But without having implemented the above, it seems, there IS a guarantee that your feeds won’t reach too many users ! Take your pick.

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We’re back with some cool new features with iAspire. We have been listening to our users, and have just put in a few of the most wanted features. Here’s a quick overview:

1. Create your own Aspirations: We have just modified this feature to do away with the moderation because all you users had been adding really great Aspirations. You can click the “Create an Aspiration” button on the top right corner of the page to create an Aspiration.

You would need to upload an image for the Aspiration which is lesser than 50kB in size in jpeg/gif/png format. And you’ll be directed straight to the Aspiration page where you can add the aspiration, and then Inspire your friends to add this Aspiration too. So go ahead, and Express yourself.You’ll see a “Report Abuse” link beside all Aspirations created by users. We are sure our users would use this link to keep iAspire clean and free of any inappropriate content.

2. Convert your Aspirations to DoneIts: iAspire is not just about Expressing your Aspirations, but also about collaborating with your friends, Inspiring each other, and actually achieving your Aspirations. So when you have done that, you can convert your Aspiration into a DoneIt. Use the DoneIt button beside your Aspirations on the “My Aspirations” page to convert your Aspirations to DoneIts.

Upon doing this, you can edit the text that you had enterd while adding the Aspirations to convert it to your DoneIt text.

3. Delete your Aspirations: We all change. Something that appeared to be the ultimate goal of our lives till yesterday might not appeal to us today. Thats why on iAspire, you can remove your Aspirations. Just look out for the cross shaped buttons on the My Aspirations page under the Aspirations and DoneIts tabs.

4. Inspire your Friends: All applications have invites. Its not without reason that an iAspire Invite is called “Inspiring a Friend”. When you Inspire a friend to join a certain Aspiration, and the friend joins it, we credit you for having successfully inspired your Friend. You’ll see a link about the details of the people you have inspired on the My Aspirations page.

Hope you have a lot of fun with these features. We are very keen to listen to all you users, so keep the feedback coming.Keep Aspiring andInspiring,The iAspire Team

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The number of Applications on Facebook has risen continuously since Facebook announced its Developer API in mid 2007. While there has been a slew of applications, it is very easy to see a clear trend. As much as 50% of the applications on Facebook are identity definition applications like Characteristics and Compare People, where people characterize their friends, and get characterized in various ways. A big share of the rest of the pie is taken by communication enabling applications like FunWall and SuperPoke which identified the limitations in Facebook early-on and made a field-day of the lower restrictions on spamming in the early days of the Facebook Developer Platform.

Is that all? Can a Facebook Application go beyond the fun to be had out of throwing cows at people, and try to do something that is useful, engaging and fun at the same time? Is there much sense in trying to do anything like that on Facebook? Why not an independent site? These are big questions. And questions any one launching a web-app today must answer. We have taken a close look at Facebook, and we think we have an answer.

We think it makes a lot of sense for a lot of web-apps to start out on Facebook, and here’s why:

1. An existing Social Graph: Any web-app that needs connections between its users to be established should consider being on Facebook. It makes a lot of sense to utilize the connections that people have already built on Facebook with their friends, family and strangers, than to try building it all over again from scratch in a stand-alone web-application.

2. Diverse user demographics: While almost all of the current most successful applications on Facebook have ridden on huge activity of teenagers on Facebook, there is a continuously rising base of users who are post their mid twenties, are college grads, and are not really interested in xMe and SuperPoke. A “useful, engaging and fun app” sure might appeal to them.

3. Freedom to Developers: Facebook allows developers to do pretty much anything inside their applications as long as they do not bother Facebook users who don’t want to use the application. This allows developers to do just about as much they could have done on an independent web-site, at a place the user frequents often.

The above three factors, combined together, offer a very exciting possibility for anyone launching a web-app today. Your web-app might be of the “serious” kind, and not as much “fun” or “viral” as a FunWall or Compare People, but it would still make a lot of sense to launch it on Facebook. What more, a “serious” application can potentially put the Social Graph to more interesting, beneficial and directly monetizable uses.

Of course, the opportunity comes with its own set of hazards. More later!

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iAspire is an innovative, meaningful and engaging new application on Facebook by Mobicules. Express your Aspirations, and know what others Aspire to with iAspire. Discover people with similar Aspirations, and grow your network by connecting with them. Join iAspire on Facebook.

Visit this page for the latest news, views and updates about iAspire.

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