Facebook Applications that I am working on (nearly 2 million users and growing fast!)
It’s time I dispel some of the mystery surrounding the Facebook Applications that I have been spending my time building these past few months. I’ve mentioned in previous posts that I have been spending time building Facebook Applications on the Platform. Well, it’s time I mentioned what I’ve been working on.
A large number of the applications that I’ve built from the ground up with a partner (who wishes to remain nameless) consists of one group, which are basically TV shows, and another group, which contain several sports.
Some of our television shows applications include gems such as Dane Cook, Family Guy, and Harry Potter, just to name a few, with the first two reaching nearly 200,000 users each.
Our sports offerings include major sports including baseball, football, and hockey, with each passing the 100,000 users mark just recently.
The great thing about having a network of applications instead of one or two big ones is that they all help each other out in increasing the number of users for each one because of the heavy inter-linking going on between all of them.
We’ve been pushing out major updates every few days since we first launched these applications, and it’s been a wild ride so far. As long as we continue to please our users, I have no doubt that our growth rate will stay steady for quite some time.
With every new feature that we add to our applications, the stickiness gets better and better, which results in users returning to our applications, looking for more things to do.
So, that’s that. It’s what I’ve been working on recently. And hopefully some good will come out of it. 
(A full list of all of our applications are listed at the top of every one of our applications, so if you feel like checking them out, then install one of our Sports applications for our sports apps, and one of our TV Shows applications for our TV Show apps.)
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craziness
Congrats on all the users, it must be thrilling to have so many users and such fast growth. Did you have much difficulty scaling? Who are you hosting with?
Here’s a monetization option for you…http://apps.facebook.com/thenewsroom
Paul, scaling is a huge issue and we’re basically tackling that every day. We’ve been moving between a few hosts right now, finding the one with the best fit
Interesting.. Does the server get one hit per profile view? Or is the profile part cached by facebook until you push to their server?
Anyway, sounds like fun, keep up the interesting posts.
Paul, anything on the profile is cached by Facebook. It’s that way so that a profile never hangs on load; therefore, our pageviews and servers are not affected by user profiles.
@Paul - fun fact: FBML has if-logic tags, making it possible for Facebook to cache a “dynamic” static pages.
@Gary - did you come out to the FacebookCamp in Toronto on Tuesday?
Tony no unfortunately I couldn’t make it.
Ah. There’s a bunch of blog posts tagged with FacebookCampToronto if you’re interested. The couple of presentations by the Facebook staff were interesting, but anything actually technical was really basic and slow - you didn’t miss much there.
Facebook is rocketing even till now. It’s great application.