Hi5 OpenSocial Hackathon: Interview Wayne Mak

At the Hi5 OpenSocial hackathon I interviewed Wayne Mak, developer of social application Nicknames.
http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=4071248179

A few excerpts from the interview:

About his social applications
I wrote Nicknames with my business partner Adam Gries, it has 6M users.
We made other applications: introductions, lingos. Now we port these applications to myspace, hi5 orkut using opensocial.

About OpenSocial
I had many problems early on, I started on hi5, there were some issues, on myspace the application would uninstall itself. But at this point it seems the platform has really matured, and I don't have any of these issues anymore. We're just a few weeks away from the hi5 launch, we're just quickly porting our applications, the forum has been very useful. It's just a matter of sitting down and coding.

Advice for developers
A good way to get into these things: if you can look at example code, look at exactly what the application is doing behing the scene. The documentation can be more than you need. The developer forums are invaluable: people are answering questions, both from the development team, and other developers.
In terms of building these applications, move as quickly as possible, come up with an idea and implement a prototype, andt hen go back and refine. It's so awesome because there are not many applications on these platforms yet, so once it launches everyone is on a level playing field, your app is running alongside one that was developed by a corporation, they have equal chances to become that next blockbuster app and I think that's really a huge opportunity.

Technology used in the app
We use PHP/MySQL, we send data to our servers using the makeRequest call. We're looking into the datastore but haven't gotten to that yet. On the client side we use javascript, but no libraries. Maybe will try prototype.

Fun story
The application I built a long time ago with my friend is called Nickname. It's funny the way we came up with the idea. We were working on another application which was not doing well at all, I was on the phone with him, I don't want to talk to you right now, I don't want to work on it but I have to work on it. And he just mentioned the word names, and suddenly I was thinking nicknames, oh my god this is huge
It was 9 pm I was in Harward Square, outside, coding away, and suddenly I switched gears and started coding Nicknames, and then I called him at midnight and he joined me in Harvard Square and we coded until 5 am.
there was nothing to eat outside and we were so hungy and we were tired
the next day we had a 100 users and a month later we had a million users
That was an amazin experience
the past 6 to 8 months have been absolutely amazing, since then I've quit my job and I'm working on all these apps and meeting people in silicon valley who are so motivated on creating these big things. i couldn't love it more

Monetization
advertising we have social media on our application.
we plan to do the same thing for opensocial

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• opensocial
• socialsoft
• hi5
• orkut
• facebook
• apis
• google
• events
• social
• software
• nicknames

[jjjcddd]

Does not move.

[robsondantas83]

Hi Patrick! Nice to see another great interview!

You were really great at Summit 08 here in Sao Paulo / Brazil.