The Ultimate (Face)Phonebook
Back in September 2007, I found out about an event that was happening in Sunnyvale a month away (October 2007). The event, CommunityNext: Platform, centered around the Facebook platform and it sounded promising. It was a two day long event — the first day being dubbed Developer Day where some top Facebook application developers dicuss their experiences and technical problems they ran into in building their application and the second day being everything business related.
The real opportunity besides meeting the folks there was a 24 Hr. Facebook Iron Coder Contest. I had to do a little begging, but I was able to convince Bigi and Wilson to come along. :) (And luckily for us, my friend Tom, who lived in Mountain View at the time, was nice enough to welcome us — we got the living room floor to ourselves!) We were excited for the competition — we felt it was going to be a great opportunity to show what some guys from Davis can do. The day before the event, I started pondering up a handful of ideas and bouncing them with Bigi.
Little did we know, when we got to the event, Noah decided to give us more “rules” regarding the contest, “Build something where it involves education and the world.” I was bummed! Our idea that we came in with didn’t fit those categories so we had to draw up a new plan. We eventually made an application that translates your English comments to a myriad of other languages, good enough for the “Most Useful Application” award and a Mac Mini prize.
We never really had too much time to work on the original idea though, which was making contact book Facebook application. I thought it was such a no brainer idea. I remember many of my friends would create “Events” whenever they lose their cell phones or change their numbers. I felt it was not efficient and definitely a pain in the butt. My idea was simple and would solve that issue:
- User adds the application and input only their contact information.
- We (Pure) would already pull all the contact information that Facebook allows (Which meant we couldn’t touch users phone numbers and e-mail addresses because of TOS, though.)
- User then send invitations to their friends to add the application
- Friends input their contact information and send to their network of friends.
- As user friends add the app and inserts their information, user Contact Book builds.
User would only be able to see their friends’ contact information. When user lose their phone or get a new number, user only needs to update their information on the application. Because the information is in the cloud, all their friends would have the information as well. Simple. Efficient. No Hassle. Useful. But, one problem. We’re a “third party” developer so users would be hesitant to give out their information. Since the application is only useful when the majority of the user’s friends use the application, we were going to fight a losing battle.
Every now and then I think about what this application could have been if we were able to have the resources and time to focus on developing this product. If the application were to take off, most importantly it would solve a great problem that all of us (that do not have a paid Plaxo account) have. But, in reality, I knew the cost/benefit would be far better for Facebook to implement the concept themselves. They hold to the key to trust when it comes to my friends/network and me vs. strangers. But, would Facebook solve this problem for us?
I’m delighted to say, they have! It’s a bummer that we couldn’t build on this idea much, but the important thing is Facebook just gave their users a big reason to keep their mobile application. I know this will be useful down the line.
