Mark Zuckerberg looks on while Todd Chaffee and team build the Six Degrees application
MIKAMAI was honored to participate in the Facebook hackathon this past weekend in London, with Facebook executives including Mark Zuckerberg, Brett Taylor, Ethan Beard, and Christian Hernandez stopping in to check out progress, judge the applications, and give some insider tips.
A hackathon is where developers work into the night to come up with a quick solution to a difficult problem. Hackathons have been part of the Facebook culture from the start in Mark’s dorm room at Harvard where he launched Facebook.
Our goal was to build the Six Degrees application which shows how you are connected to people outside of your personal network. To learn more, check out the video below of Todd Chaffee presenting the finished application to Facebook executives. The response to the application was great, with Mark Zuckerberg offering tips on how we might handle large numbers of users once the application becomes popular.
Facebook also hosted an event for the press and big brands the following day, covered in this article on the Guardian Website where you can read about why Mark Zuckerberg thinks that personalisation of the web is creating a new wave of opportunity for companies using social media to “build products around people”.
A big thanks to Karl Bunyan, the original developer of the Six Degrees application who gave us permission to re-launch it using the new Facebook Open Graph API. Keep your eye on Karl’s latest project Join The Company, which will be a sure source of interesting applications in the near future.
One of the best parts of the event was the opportunity to work with developers outside the MIKAMAI team. In addition to Todd and myself from MIKAMAI, we had Dave Nattriss, Tom Fletcher, and all the way from Milan, Italy, Pier Gorelli of Insana.
With all those new faces the event was social, fun, and most of all we got the application built. Just as invaluable was getting the inside word directly from Facebook executives about future direction and their vision of how brands can create a personal and social experience on the web .
And stay tuned for a link to the new application once we put on the finishing touches!
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