Web 2 Ireland

Application development on social networking platforms was the hot topic this week at the Graphing Social Patterns conference in San Diego. Ironically it’s like the wild wild west of a few hundred years ago – lots of prospectors in an undefined territory where the opportunity is massive.

Here are the key challenges and recommendations I collected from the speakers and conversations I had at the conference:

Challenges:

• Applications and widgets are hard to monetize. Traditionally brand advertising is related to the web CONTENT (e.g. target “Grey’s Anatomy” watchers because they appear to fit with the brand). Essentially the new world of social network advertising is trying to monetize NEW types of experiences and context-free environments. Since users can create any type of group, profile, page etc. there is some fear over what the ads will be placed next to.
• There are low barriers to entry. Anyone and their dog (who knows a bit about PHP) can create an application on Facebook rather quickly at very low cost. This has lead to low quality, low utility, disposable, spammy apps but the good news is that the trend is quickly moving towards high value, engaging, quality apps.
• The metrics for measuring and analysing applications are minimal. This is an evolving area in itself.
• There are multiple APIs. OpenSocial vs. Facebook/Bebo platform – different audiences, channels, usage patterns etc.

Recommendations:

• Develop apps that have utility and meaning. Facebook is changing the rules of the platform to protect its users and provide an experience that increases communication and improves user engagement.
• Ensure your app is: 1. Clear in its proposition and easy to use, 2. Measurable – track growth, engagement, advertising etc., and 3. Flexible – many crappy trials beats deep thinking/planning (Note: I believe this was the case for the low quality apps but the future apps require significant planning to make them of value. The main point of this is to get it out there early to see how users react – “perpetual beta”)
• Apps have three distinct stages of development: 1. Marketing – use appropriate channels to spread your “call to action”; 2. Growth – tune and track virality; What are the other apps in your category doing?; 3. Engagement – increase page views and time spent on site
• The level of trust must be improved between the users, applications, networks, and marketers.
• Plan for a portable ID. The industry trend points towards a future that allows for an ID that’s shared between applications/networks but will be controlled by the users (e.g. permissions)
• For social games the “social” aspect is more important than the “game” – it’s better when your friends are contacting you to “play”. You still must implement typical aspects of gaming – level/goal progression, turns, leader-boards, incentives/rewards: gifts, unlocking features etc.

Ciarán Rooney just let us know about this meetup on this coming Saturday.

Some of Ireland's finest and brightest webmasters, SEOers, SEMers, designers and developers are getting together next weekend for a meetup with people flying in from all over Europe.

All details over on the Weeno blog.

We want to put together a consolidated email distribution list of web companies on the island to replace the mish-mash of lists each of us has at the minute. This would be very a very low volume editor-broadcast only list which would complement the blog and obviously would not be made available to anyone else.

UPDATE: We’ve changed the sign-up due to the high demand. If you wish to be added to the list, please apply to join the Web2Ireland Google Group here.

We’ll also email those of you we already know to see if you wish to be added.

As a sweetener, Roomex has made a very kind offer of discounted hotel rooms to anyone who is on this web2 list. There is an extra discount if you get your name in to us and room booked by Thursday evening! We’ll forward the offer details as soon as you mail us. A big thanks to Jack Donaghy in Roomex for this.

Gordon from eWrite has written a great post on the Cork OpenCoffee blog about the potential for “crowdsourcing” some templates and guidelines for biz plans and similar docs.

Given that we all have to create a decent deck at the very least, why re-invent the wheel every time? As a community we should be able to help each other with nitty gritty like overall structures and expected topics in this type of documentation.

If you have some thoughts, examples or lessons learned that you want to share, please do so in the comments on the OCC post.

For the more technical readers of Web2Ireland, there is a TurboGears (TG) sprint happening around the world this January. TG is a Python web framework used to quickly and efficiently build web applications. In Ireland the two main users I know of are Lukulu and LouderVoice.

The idea is to accelerate development of the next version of the framework by having a giant TG2 sprint/party on 12th/13th of January, and do it at various places all around the world on the same weekend. There will be several in the US, at least one in the UK, one in Germany and if there is sufficient interest we could have one in Ireland. One of the lead devs (Alberto Valverde) now lives in Dublin.

Irish users of Django and Pylons would be more than welcome as there is plenty of sharing that can go on between the three frameworks (and TG2 sits on Pylons). Testers and documentation people are very welcome too.

Let us know if you are interested. If there is a sufficient number, I’ll see if someone can host it in Dublin.

We’ve registered paddysvalley.org as a domain for the main sign-up page for the PaddysValley tour of Silicon Valley. Please enter your details on the simple form there. You can also see who else has signed up.

We just issued this press release to over fifty news organisations and all County Enterprise Boards:

An ad-hoc group of Irish business people have decided to form their own delegation to tour Silicon Valley and create closer bonds with companies and people in the mecca of the computer world. The tour nicknamed “PaddysValley” will head off at the start of November, taking advantage of the new air routes from Aer Lingus.

Tour organiser James Corbett stated ‘The general idea is that it is hard to attract inward investment and start collaborations when our startups are over here in Ireland while the largest group of investors and tech companies are concentrated in Silicon Valley. As a result it is hard to convince Valley investors and potential partners why they
should come to Ireland when they have such rich pickings over there. With this current situation it was decided we should visit them, or as I like to put it “if you can’t bring the Valley to Paddy, bring Paddy to the Valley” ‘

Conor O’Neill of LouderVoice is a strong believer in the ability of European start-ups to compete at a global level. “It is crucial for us to build our networks and our profile in the places that matter. Silicon Valley remains one of the places that matters most. An important job for all Irish entrepreneurs is to get out there, meet all those who we have admired for so long and learn from them”. He added “We must continue to build a start-up culture in this country and PaddysValley is one of the ways we can do that.”

It is hoped that the group will meet some of the big names of Silicon Valley as well as host an Irish night where Irish businesses will demo what they are doing to the Silicon Valley executives, venture capitalists and Irish ex-pats. So far 17 Irish companies have signed up for the tour but the organisers stress it is open to everyone and they’d welcome anyone who wants to come along.

More details are available on the Web 2.0 Ireland website at: http://web2ireland.org

Irish Web companies have been getting a lot of International attention of late with a detailed writeup about them on tech website ReadWriteWeb: http://url.ie/3o4 showing what the Irish have to offer.

Contact Details: Conor O’Neill is available on 087- 979 0297 and conor AT argolon DOT com

James Corbett has set up a wiki called Paddy’s Valley so we can all discuss “Seven Days in the Valley” and indicate things like preferred dates, desired aims etc. Head on over and start contributing.

Some discussion on James’s post

And more on Damien’s too.

I have many fond memories of the EI-organised trip I did to California back in 1999. We spent the week receiving lectures from some great people like Bob Sutton in Stanford and we also did a bunch of field trips to companies like Cisco, HP, Excite, Ideo etc.

At this stage there are a lot of us in Ireland who know the Valley and the Bay Area quite well and have a good bunch of contacts there. However because of the distance and cost, unless there is a direct and immediate business reason to go, most of us visit rarely.

Then I read Jeremy Fain’s Blog and I realised we are being far too short-term in our thinking. Jeremy writes:

That's why I decided a couple weeks ago to organize a study trip to Silicon Valley. It will be a week-long study trip focusing on the business of innovation & technology (entrepreneurship, venture capital, software, computer networks & hardware, consumer electronics & Internet, telecommunications) and actually take place between Sunday, 25th November 2007 and Sunday, 2nd December 2007. No kidding, it's serious business so save the dates!

In no time at all he had a bunch of people interested in joining him. Similar things have been done before with great success like the Israel Web Tour.

Perhaps we are getting too used to having the Valley come to us in Europe and it is time to return the compliment and meet all those people we admire on their turf? I’m open to helping to arrange something like this later this year. Who would like to discuss this further?

It’s great to see an idea take flight the way Saul’s OpenCoffee Club one has over here. The first round of get-togethers has happened in Dublin, Limerick and Cork with the next ones imminent. My sense is that it is tapping into a very strong need for face to face networking by the tech and start-up community in Ireland.

It’ll take time to get the investment community involved but in the meantime, there are myriad opportunities for developers and entrepreneurs at each of the locations. Having said that, Jan from Touristr still managed to find an unsuspecting potential investor in Limerick!

To stay up to date keep an eye on the following blogs:

• Eoghan for Dublin
• James, Mary and Jan for Limerick
• Argolon for Cork

The Limerick crew are up for attending the odd Cork one and I’m interested in heading up to them too. Now all we need is one in Athlone or Portlaoise that is central to everyone!