Facebook Garage London

Last November my friends Michele and Vito started the implementation of an idea for an environmental community driven site: greenester.com (will soon be ready- hopefully:) Of course nobody knew it. Of course, we wanted to make it known. How? By exploiting the viral character of Facebook applications, a common practice lately:). So I became a Facebook developer. And last week I received an invitation to attend the Facebook Garage event in London.

Today I went there. It was hosted by Sun Microsystems. It started very good; with canapes food. Then came the pizzas. Then they opened the beers. And then came the belly dancers. I am joking, no belly dancers. Just a girl announcing the begining of the session.

Geeks like fun. So they started with a new anti-Facebook Anthem from YouTube (or YouTunes as we hear in one of the Obama Girl's videos:) After some not-so-interesting speeches, at least for me- we had a break. During it I was approach by a young woman, who showed interest in what I am doing and then asked for my email. No, she didn't want to date me, otherwise she would ask for my phone number, right? Right. I am in London, and I think this is called head hunting or something like that. I told her that I am writing a book, but she didn't seem to care much, because then she asked me if I know php:)

The second part was more interesting, dealing with some legal issues. The case study was the bad people from scrubulus application coping the scrabble game. Finally, the results of a poll application were shown, which was conducted online in real time during the event. "I think that Applications on the site are useful for" was the name of the application, and the winner was the option "nothing" with 54%. The message was clear: we, the developers, had to make useful applications. This was in harmony with the next speech about the Rambo Application. It was created for Sony pictures for the promotion of their movie. The interesting part was an analysis of the 'success' parameters that make an application viral, which the wannabe developer can enjoy at the last picture.

After it finished I got one more free Becks and I went home.

PS Talking about viral spreading, it made me a great impression what happened yesterday after publishing the post on the breaking news about the arrival of the new Asus eee; the last 3 months I had 300 hits on my website. Between 10:00-12:00 yesterday they launched to more than 500 , and after 12:00 almost nothing. Maybe because then the CeBIT started, providing more up-to-date information about the eee. Any ideas?