Robert Janelle

By Robert Janelle
Originally published in National Capital Scan, April 2008

On a Friday afternoon, TravelPod  founder Luc Levesque sat back and cracked open a beer, relaxing from three weeks of hard work.
Travel IQ, a geography quiz developed  by  the  company  had  just  been uploaded  to Facebook and  they were awaiting  approval.

Mr. Levesque  and his staff watched as the  Facebook  employee  testing  the game  installed  it.

Soon after, the employee’s friends began installing it and from  there  it  was being  installed  on  hundreds  of  profles, eventually peaking at 1.9 million installs.

“Once it gets out in the wild, it propagates and spreads virally,” says Mr. Levesque.

TravelPod  is  just  one Ottawa  firm that’s  joined  the  social  networking gold rush since Facebook made its application programming interface (API) public in May 2007.

While other social networking sites like MySpace and Friendster allow developers to create little widgets for profles, they are limited  in the functionality they create and even more limited in how to monetize what is built.

Facebook,  by  contrast,  went  completely  open  and  allowed  developers to create whatever they wanted, within reason.  It’s an appealing platform  for developers  because  the  ‘viral’  nature of  having  friends  invite  other  friends to install an app. It takes only one click to install it, rather than having to sign up and wait  for a confrmation Email like stand-alone web applications.

TravelPod,  which  provides  a  platform  for  travel blogs, had previously created a badge for social networking profiles  to  give  users  of  their  service an attractive link to their travel blogs. But  with  the  possibility  created  by Facebook’s completely open API, Mr. Levesque wanted to do more.

Inspired by games he played with travel companions at bus stations and airport terminals,  TravelPod  built  a  geography quiz  game  which rewards (or  punishes) players at the end  with  a  Travel IQ score, which can also be displayed on their  profle,  giving Facebookers  something to compete over.

Along  with the ability to quickly compare game scores, one of the hallmarks of social media is the ability to share  interesting content on  the Internet.

With  that  in  mind,  entrepreneur Allan Isfan has been working to bring social video sharing to Facebook with his application, FaveQuest.

“I  noticed  three  waves  culminating  into something  big,” says  Mr. Isfan. “Online  entertainment, social networking and personalization. We wanted to build something that would ride all three waves.”

The  idea  behind  FaveQuest  is  that users install the application and tell it which  videos  they  like.  It  then  looks through  the  files of friends who are also using FaveQuest to see what videos they are watching and brings them in  as  recommendations.

While FaveQuest  is  in  the  wild, Mr.  Isfan  says it’s  still  being  tinkered  with  and  he expects wider adoption once it’s ready
for an offcial launch.

With  everything  that  can  now  be done  through  social  networking, the most  common  use  is  still  communication.  For  some  people, sites like  Facebook  have  replaced  Email and  iotum CEO Alec Saunders has brought voice communication to the platform with  the FREE Conference Calls  application, which  allows  users with a microphone to make group calls  through  the  social  networking site.

The  conference  calling  application  was  inspired  by  an  older  iotum product,  a  Blackberry  presence  app that  would  notify  users  when  their contacts were  available.

After  studying the usage, Mr. Saunders found the most popular use for the program was to schedule conference calls.

This  led to plans to build a social network platform around group calls. But while working on the platform, Facebook’s  open  API  was  released and the decision was made to build on their network.

FREE Conference Calls was adopted a  little more slowly  than other applications,  but  through  some  creative marketing  (Mr.  Saunders  uses  the application  to host a daily podcast)  it was eventually installed by more than 200,000  users.

While  the  iotum  app is  mostly  used  by  small  businesses, there  have  been  some  other  interesting uses.

“One  person  held  a wake with  it,” says Mr. Saunders.

As with any online venture, the biggest  challenge  is  usually figuring  out how  to bring  in  a  revenue  stream.

In the  case  of  iotum,  the  company  receives a commission for sending traffc  to  the voice over Internet protocol (VOIP)  providers  they’ve  partnered with.

For Mr. Levesque, the original plan was  use  to  Travel  IQ  to  send  more traffc  to  the  TravelPod  network  but they’ve since been able to secure sponsorship from the likes of NBC, giving the game a  life of  its own.

TravelPod is  now  looking  to  build  on  that  success with the recently created division TravelPod Labs, which  is  dedicated
to building more social network widgets.

With  FaveQuest,  Mr.  Isfan  has been approaching media companies about white-boxing  the  application so  they can create  their own branded  social  video  portals.  He’s  also been  contacted  by  smaller  companies  looking  to  use  his  system  to
distribute  corporate  training videos to employees.

Besides  monetization,  there  other challenges  specific  to  developing  on a third-party platform.

The biggest being changes to code that tend to break everyone’s applications.

“In the early days, we were a moving target,” says Mr. Saunders, whose developers used  to have  to  scramble to change the application on a weekly basis  to  keep  up  with  platform  updates.

According  to  all  three  entrepreneurs,  that  situation  has  improved thanks to regular updates in newsletters and a discussion forum for developers.

However,  there are also  some  issues with limits placed on Facebook developers.

To  keep  the  site  from being infested with spam, limits are placed  on  the  number  of  notifications  an  application  can  send  in  a day. This makes  it  difficult  for  iotum  to  add  a  feature  that  automatically invites users to scheduled conference calls.

“But in their defence, they are very responsive,”  says Mr.  Saunders  who has argued his case with the Palo Alto, California-based  company on  a number of occasions.

Finally,  there  is  an  issue  of  fickle Facebook  users.

While  the  platform is  appealing  due  to  easy  one-click installs  for  programs,  it  also  takes  a single mouse click to uninstall it.

“You  can  build  anything  you want in Facebook,” says Mr. Saunders. “But it’s hard to build something good.”

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