RockYou at Girls in Tech Developer Forum

It's an OpenSocial GenerationA year’s worth of growth, tips, and tricks

Raymond Chan - November 19, 2008

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What is RockYou?

Mission – “To engage the world through social applications”

Leading developer across all major social networks and platforms– MySpace, Facebook, hi5, orkut, Friendster, Bebo, Xiaonei…

Large Social Application Reach (excluding profile widgets)

– Over 90+ million uniques (monthly)

RockYou! Team– ~80 employees across engineering, product, business

development and sales

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Overview

OpenSocial turns one– Reviewing a year of enormous growth

What is OpenSocial?– Overview of the community process– Example applications– Coding a simple “Hello World” app

Developer tips and lessons learned– OpenSocial cross-container tips– Using analytics to scale – a brief overview of RYStatz

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What’s so interesting about OpenSocial?

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What’s so interesting about OpenSocial?

Later that year…

6Taken from OpenSocial “State of

the Union” presentation

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Taken from OpenSocial “State of the Union” presentation

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A Year of Enormous Growth

A resounding success across the OpenSocial ecosystem– 315m+ app installs– 85m+ daily canvas views

RockYou’s Success– Launched a portfolio of applications: self expression,

communication / messaging, dating, virtual pets– Installed over 55m times– Material to driving RockYou’s global reach of over 90m monthly

users

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What is OpenSocial?

It’s a specification– Set of standards for sharing social data and building social

applications on the web– Defines a set of social APIs and standards– Built upon open standards, and utilizes open-source philosophies

It’s a community– Containers (social sites), application developers, anybody who is

interested– Open-source implementations (Apache Shindig)– The OpenSocial Foundation

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Exercising the Open Source Model

“The OpenSocial Specification is constantly evolving.  The basic idea behind our process is to treat the spec like an open source software project, following some basic tenets from the Apache Software Foundation:– Participation is open to anyone– Decisions are made on the spec list (not behind closed doors)– All proceedings are captured in a public archive

– Individuals represent themselves, not companies”From www.opensocial.org

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So what can we build with OpenSocial?

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Application Spotlight – Super Pets!

Highly-engaging virtual pets – users adopt and customize pets, then accessorize them and participate in casual and competitive gaming

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Application Spotlight – Super Pets!

Pet customizations / accessories

•Virtual Currency / Digital Economy

•Battling / Casual Gaming

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Application Spotlight – Emote

RockYou’s most widely-distributed self expression application

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Writing a social “Hello World” app

Easy to get started– Basic apps composed of HTML + javascript– Some containers do not even require hosting (just paste in the

code)

Basic concepts– Application gadget XML– Views – profile, canvas

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Example Gadget XML

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?><Module> <ModulePrefs title="Hello World!" author_email="raymond@rockyou.com"> <Require feature="opensocial-0.8" /> </ModulePrefs> <Content type="html" view="profile"> <![CDATA[ Hello, Profile! ]]> </Content> <Content type="html" view="canvas"> <![CDATA[ Hello, Canvas! ]]> </Content></Module>

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ModulePrefs

<ModulePrefs title="Hello World!" author_email="raymond@rockyou.com"> <Require feature="opensocial-0.8" /> </ModulePrefs>

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Content element per view

<Content type="html" view="profile"> <![CDATA[ <!–- add html and javascript here, as if this were a body section of a web page -->

]]> </Content>

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Making “Hello World!” a bit more social

<script type="text/javascript">

function request() {var idspec = opensocial.newIdSpec({ "userId" : "OWNER", "groupId" : "FRIENDS" });var req = opensocial.newDataRequest();req.add(req.newFetchPersonRequest(opensocial.IdSpec.PersonId.OWNER), "get_owner");req.add(req.newFetchPeopleRequest(idspec), "get_friends");req.send(response);

};

function response(dataResponse) {var owner = dataResponse.get('get_owner').getData();var friends = dataResponse.get('get_friends').getData(); var html = 'Friends of ' + owner.getDisplayName();html += ':<br><ul>';friends.each(function(person) { html += '<li>' + person.getDisplayName() + '</li>';});html += '</ul>';document.getElementById('message').innerHTML = html;

};

// Execute the request function when the application is finished loading. gadgets.util.registerOnLoadHandler(request);

</script>

<div id="message"> </div>

From OpenSocial Developer’s Guide

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Developer Tips and Lessons Learned

OpenSocial == Cross-container development

Importance of messaging in social apps

Dealing with scale

Importance of effective analytics for success

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Cross-Container Development Tips

Design flexible layouts to accommodate different view sizes

Gracefully handle differences in how containers handle user information– Default fields, querying by user ids (0.7), page sizes / ordering

Take time to understand how messaging channels are implemented on different containers– User experience varies greatly site to site– Wide range of user preferences across social networks

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Cross-Container Development Tips

OpenSocial applications have proven to be portable, even to Facebook

Canvas pages shared between OpenSocial and Facebook– Use common-sense encapsulation and abstraction

Facebook iframe application using XFBML/FBJS

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Scaling social apps

Good problem to have, bad problem to deal with…

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Months (1)

Facebook platform launch

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Scaling social apps

If you have lots of money, build everything yourself…

Otherwise…

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Gratuitous screenshot of app stats

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Randomized trials for testing application features

Running two profile designs simultaneously; users grouped by their network ids

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Diagnosing / monitoring complex systems

App activity measure

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Diagnosing / monitoring complex systems

Overlay deployments

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When good sites go bad

Important to understand your app’s dependencies (yellow line is API call failures)

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When good sites go bad

Effect on application functionality

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fin

Questions / comments?

Contact: Raymond Chan (raymond@rockyou.com)