Hungry Machine Blog

You haven't heard from us for a while because we were working on a new project - LivingSocial - the web-site that spreads across all major social networks (Facebook, Myspace, Bebo, Orkut) allowing people to talk to each other about their interests without barriers. We are going to speak more about it in a dedicated blog while keeping this one for posts on Rails and other technologies.

We just got back from several conferences around the social media space. CommunityNext was a developer-centric event that allowed for many interactions and trading of best practices with several top Facebook developers. GraphingSocial was a slightly larger gathering that brought together an impressive list of speakers including Reid Hoffman, Michael Arrington, Danny Sullivan and others. It was a great opportunity to network, see some of the latest Facebook applications, and just generally talk shop with investors and developers in the social media space. Sometimes at these events it's so easy to get lost in the shuffle, that it is tough to talk with the people you want to talk to. We did, however, have what we determined to be a strategic advantage: Eye Candy

Here's how it went down:

Step 1: Several weeks before event ~ Randomly sign up for booth and to be a conference sponsor without really having a plan other than "A booth seems like a good idea. We can talk to people. And stuff."

Step 2: 7 days and 3 minutes before event ~ Contemplate whether "Hungry Machine Hula Hoops" send the right message.

Step 3: 7 days and 2 minutes before event ~ Return to fetal position in corner

Step 4: 3 days before event ~ Eureka! An idea is born. Everybody loves Twittervision and everybody loves money - let's combine the two!

Step 5: 2 days before the event ~ Begin building application that shows the geographic distribution of impressions and clicks within the Hungry Machine ad network (pic below)

Step 6: 1 day before event ~ Take break from building application because In & Out Burger is just too damn good.

Step 7: Later in that day ~ Eat 3rd double double

Step 8: Day of event ~ Deploy application; set up Apple 30 inch monitor that seems to emit a radioactive hue. Notice third arm grow out of small child as he passes monitor

Step 9: Booth now open for business! Potential clients, partners and just plain interesting folks start to roll in. They cannot resist the lure that is a 30 inch monitor with people's heads popping up on a world map.

In all seriousness, the above process was only slightly embellished, but really did serve a purpose in how successful and how much we got out of the GraphingSocial conference. Having an initial, built-in talking point is a great way to break the ice with people you are interested in talking with, and generally helps reveal someone's area of interest within the first minute or two of conversation. We would not have had nearly as successful of a conference without a little extra pizzazz.

In the good ol’ days of, let’s say…. three months ago, life was simple. The birds chirped a bit louder, the grass was a little greener, and, best of all, you could build an app on Facebook, submit it to the directory, tag it with a category or two, and see it nestle in among a smattering of other applications and watch your traffic grow at an obscene pace. Those days are over. Kuput. Finito. Building an app on Facebook and letting it “do its thing” is an increasingly difficult, if not impossible thing to do. The good news is that there are a host of traditional and non-traditional ways to gather good, quality traffic for your application. The bad news is that, very likely, it’s going to cost you:

Buy an initial seed number of users: If you can generate 10/20/30 thousand users on your app, your installed user base should be large enough at that point in time to see if it sinks or swims. You’ll likely have crossed a wide-demographic range by that point in time and have been able to see if you’ve built your app to properly leverage the viral touch points and social graph.

Generate “off-Facebook” buzz: Sure, Facebook pages aren’t crawlable. And sure, your app can’t live outside of Facebook. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a universe (you know that thing… what’s it called… that’s right, the world wide web) that does still exist outside of Facebook. If you issue a web-based press release, it could get picked up by a variety of news sources who could reference it and Google will definitely crawl it. If you know any bloggers that would have an interest in your application, reach out to them and give them a sneak peak under the hood. If you have an existing destination site, leverage it! 40+ish million people are on Facebook, which means there is a reasonable chance the viewer of your destination site is also a Facebook member.

It’s in the name: This is certainly just a hypothesis, but I think a very reasonable one. If someone sends me an app, and I can immediately understand the concept of the app pre-install, I can make a decision point prior to installation about whether or not I think the app would be useful. I may not install it, but at least there is a chance that I will. If I don’t immediately grok how the app will work prior to install, there is no chance I will install it – what is it going to ask of me? Will I have to go out of Facebook to register for a site?

Just a few thoughts to consider when figuring out how to make your app go from 0 to 60(thousand users, that is) in 5 seconds flat.

The Wall Street Journal had a nice article yesterday about the rush to build apps in the Facebook space, in which they were kind enough to mention Hungry Machine. One of the points Riva touched on was around the different rationales for building an app. I wanted to elaborate a bit more on a few of the biggest reasons some of our partners seem to be entering the space.

1. Drive traffic to existing properties: Probably far and away the biggest reason most businesses are building apps – a traffic driving distribution play from Facebook to an existing entity is something that could drive traffic at a considerably lower CPA than many sites are currently spending
2. Create brand awareness: Facebook is a whole new space and many of the concepts that came to fruition in the mid-late 90’s are being replicated within the FB platform. Companies that are in a particular vertical and have not been successful in penetrating that market against established players are on a level playing field. Building a successful app that does nothing more (at least initially) than providing users with a great experience within the Facebook platform is enough to build some serious brand equity to be leveraged at a later point in time.
3. Creating a new revenue stream: This is generally the primary consideration for the single-man shops, or the smallest of the small companies. Facebook apps have evolving monetization concepts that can be shaped by the early innovators, but are a bit risky for a more established company to bank on and plug into revenue forecasts. Ad networks are springing up left and right, so if you can create an even moderately successful app (50k daily PVs), it can generally be worth your while.
4. Playing the me-too: Facebook is hot and if you don’t have an app on your product plan or roadmap, well, you’re probably behind some of your competitors already. If you believe Facebook will continue to become THE social platform (as the market basically indicates), chances are you or your boss are trying to figure out the best way to get something out, and you’ll figure out how it best helps your business later.

With our own apps, we’re pretty excited about helping to shape the revenue model for apps on Facebook. Figuring out what ads work and what don’t. What levers can you pull that will bring a higher click through rate? How can you best partner with folks to leverage more users for better rates? All things we’re working on and hope to continue to innovate on for our own purposes and for our partners.

We've been helping partners promote their applications via sponsored cross-linking for a while now. I recently had an idea that has been converting very well. I encourage you to give it a try, whether it's with us or with somebody else.

It's simple: combine a positive review from your application's review wall, your 75x75 directory icon, and the facebook install button. The sample we've provided is for the neat My Music application by our friends at Qloud.

On the publisher side, you should redirect clicks through a 'reflector' so that you can track the clicks you're generating.

On the advertiser's side, you should provide a link to the publisher with a spot for the publisher to fill in the current user's UID. The target of the link should log the clicking user and then redirect the user to the application. Later on, you can reconcile the referred users with your installed userbase to ascertain a conversion rate (and thus an eCPI--effective cost per install).

And so it begins. Welcome to the maiden posting for the Hungry Machine blog. We’re 4 guys bringing our expertise in Ruby On Rails and experience from AOL, Revolution Health, and Blockbuster together to build some great new products and services. For those of you that read us at RevolutionOnRails, we have a new addition, Tim O’Shaughnessy, who will be handling a bit more of the product-side of the house for us.

We plan to continue exploring Rails, sharing our expertise with others via this blog and by releasing more plugins, and diving into new areas and applications, ranging from our continued development of Facebook applications to entirely new fields.

Lastly… why Hungry Machine? Well, we think it represents our mentality and effort we’ll put into our everyday activities… we’re hungry for success. Check back often to see what we’re up to.

Who we are:

Aaron Batalion: Aaron has been banging the Rails drum since 2005 and has been deep in the Rails community ever since. A lead portal architect for RevolutionHealth.com, Aaron was also a portal architect for Blockbuster.com.

Eddie Frederick: Eddie was a RoR lead at Revolution Health and has become one of the leading developers in the Facebook space, authoring applications with well over 1M users. He specializes in creating end-to-end user experiences from deployment to application UI.

Tim O’Shaughnessy: An entrepreneur at heart, Tim led the Product Development Department – Consumer Products at Revolution Health before helping found Hungry Machine. Tim also has has launched successful products at AOL and enjoys long walks on the beach.

Val Aleksenko: Val brings over 17 years of software development experience to Hungry Machine. Val’s like MacGyver but with software; give him a stack, a deployment script, and a Red Bull and watch him go.

Minor mention of our Visual CD Rack, a sister app of our bigger bookshelf application...

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