The Opportunity
With the rollout of its new API in May 2007, allowing developers to build embedded third-party applications, social networking phenomenon Facebook unlocked a unique and unprecedented opportunity for developers to leverage its young, active, and viral user-base. Globally, software development, start-up and venture capital communities have turned their attention to this exciting platform with an array of start-up ideas and business models.
In September 2007, Insight4 allocated resources in-house to implement an idea of its own, seeking experience in social networks and marketing, EC2, and specifically the Facebook platform. The result was a simple but viral and engaging application which attracted developer interest worldwide, and over 6000 installs within 2 months of its release.
Intended as a pilot to build skills for later Facebook projects, it was agreed that the selected application concept would need to be simple enough to permit rapid implementation, while still facilitating global user-base propagation and sufficiently beneficial exploration of Facebook’s viral capacity. The concept agreed to, dubbed ‘Beer Wars’ was one which collects and aggregates data on users’ beer preferences, producing interesting statistical reports by friend network, city, country and worldwide, as well as offering users algorithm-inferenced beer suggestions based on theirs and other users’ tastes.
In implementation, use was made of Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2); a web service providing resizable compute capacity which only became available in October 2007. Used in conjunction with Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), Amazon’s Hardware as a Service model was leveraged to produce an application which was both highly scalable, and economical.
As hoped, Beer Wars’ popularity grew steadily subsequent to its release on September 14, accumulating over 6000 user installs within 2 months of release, and attracting positive developer feedback and interest worldwide. Beer Wars has now accumulated an extensive repository of beer-consumer survey data – the scale and detail of which is perhaps unprecedented by any survey before it.
Insight4 plans to use knowledge taken from the Beer Wars project – a precursor to more extensive subsequent development – to implement useful and disruptive Facebook application concepts in the future, with strategically-developed marketing and revenue models.
