Mike Sego (Facebook AppCamp)

Presenter:
Mike Sego
Fluff-Friends

Fastest growing “pets” application on facebook.

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(Notes will be edited as time permits)

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Secret to success is being “cute” — emotional connection

Pushing information into newsfeed runs risk of flooding newsfeed with too much information.

First Feature added is increasing number of fluff friends. There is the point of diminishing returns. Going from 1->2 friends is interesting. 26->27 is less interesting.

Part of being cute is that each fluff friends has a story and “cute”.

gifts less interesting at 500 gifts than in beginning.

people join together and have petting groups.

100% of growth was friends seeing fluff friends on profile not newsfeed from growth.

added petting and naming fluff friend.

“Pet Me” — would say “looks like you don’t have ff… would you like to install”

He knows because when f8 api was broken and not having warning dialog pop-up… saw lower growth when f8 api was broke.

The wall is more compelling features of f8

“Don’t poke me … do something useful pet my ff” i

implemented cute verion of tracksor… because you see who petted your friend and when.

Petting is core to experience.

What ff is not:

pokemon – (cock fighting for little warriors?)
pokemon requires lots of enginerring effort.
f8 takes things that are very popular on internet and creates walled events.

gmail is losing market-share to facebook mail!

f8 groups –
f8 photo is crippled version compared to flickr.
just need to hit core features and will be successful on f8
“what are you doing?” is what f8 is all about.
so if you focus on how that question

ff is LAMP ( but Mike Sego – is java developer works on gmail )

social interaction is at the core.

added different features that increase would

As released features — add Moods 2.0 different moods for different ff so people would go to see other ff.

using transparent png (yech) css rendering is really hard because f8 rips up. so he has to hack up css for each browser.

Bubble – people would be having conversation with their ff talking to each other.

added food — released 2 a week … leveled off at 35 foods.. would cost friend.

food is gifting “costs money” — ltewright version of gifting… but found that most people feed their own ff’s not others.

ff had problem with how to earn money — How can I design the next feature to make previous feature

you have 7 seconds to return result to f8 — “Try again”

Using one-on-one hosting … had to shift from shared server to dedicated hosting

LAMP ( mem_cache apc — for mysql )

Added habitats – once again made previous features work better. Biggest feature — huge uptake.

786 different images on the shared vm server.

Using fb photo for the foods. but didn’t upload 786 photos because no way to programmatically load photos.

but this is great because fb

ff starting tacking

merchandising….
goodstorm — lower quality
zazzle — higher quality and will ship international

but only sold 400 shirts.

But need much higher quality

“I want a Liger…”

support cost — message bombing – trying to campaign on getting new features added (

was getting 300 emails a day — started to managing issues with FAQ. FAQ slowed down because link to find developer link.
make effort

facebook forum is useless.. no topics in forums.

so forums are offloaded. but 10000 registered users – 2000000 ff install but acts.

ff-users going to forum add value to the ff-ecosystem.

A lot of people wanted to fighting… (like pokemon)

did not want to do RPG-like things.

didn’t want to compete EA (Mike Sego used to work for EA on Sims)
single player – no p2p
multiplayer -async (works in f8 — no sync communication available)
multiplayer – sync ( much harder on f8 )
massively single player — you are not waiting on anyone else but what they do effects you.

fluff(Race)
number of fluffs per hours.

communities:
* self-expression
* and racing community….power lovers of ff.

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Choice not diverseify because that would say is he done. So chose not to.

has not looked at uninstall numbers.

super actives <5% but they really drive the you can't uninstall your ff (because that would be abandoning your ff -- so sad 🙁 ) can't sell transfer this middle-age woman whent around every day to pet 100 friends ff. 80% woman -- early college can't pet a ff more than 5 secs. prevents scriptting but does not alienate hard core users. fluff-book -- is the high page view. ** only now added invites ** hit servers ... trying to stay constant relative to number of f8 users. monetation will come when f8 makes it happen.