If you weren’t lucky enough to be there in person, Newspepper have released the video of my presentation at the April 2011 Facebook Developer Garage London.

Unfortunately the video is almost useless unless you can see the slides that I am presenting, so here they are again:

Again, I would love to know what you thought of it, so please let me know!

Newspepper has just posted a video report from the April 2011 Facebook Developer Garage in London, the one at which I presented my talk titled Facebook API in the Real World

To clarify, in case people watch it and get the wrong idea; I wasn’t giving a huge plug about how big our site Miniclip.com is, my interview did consist of more than that, what was shown in the video was an answer to 1 out of about 7 questions, and just happened to be chosen by the director!

You can find my appearances at 2.07 and 4.38 of the video embedded above.

If anyone reading this was lucky enough to see the presentation first hand, please let me know what you thought of it, I am always interested in feedback!

Last night I spoke as a guest speaker at the Facebook Developer Garage in London, the topic of my talk was how we at Miniclip have integrated the Facebook Platform to help engage our 20,000,000 registered users while playing our games. I also took the time to post a few problems that we have encountered while developing on the platform and the things we have done to overcome them.

Slides from the presentation can be seen below….Enjoy!

I would love to know what you thought about the presentation so please let me know!

Last week I released a small update to myfbid.com which allows you to see the User ID’s of all the friends you have for the currently logged in user.

The profile photos of all your friends are displayed near the bottom of the page, you can hover over each one to see their ID and go to their profile.

Myfbid.com allows you to login to Facebook and will immediately show your Facebook User ID. No personal data is collected or stored during the process – it simply looks up User ID’s and displays it on the page.

I would like to build the site into something even more useful for developers, so if anyone has any thoughts about the kind things can be added to ease the pain of developing on Facebook then I would love to hear about them.

Mark Zuckerberg and a handful of senior Facebook Executives attended a special edition of the London Facebook Developer Garage on Monday.

Their arrival signifies the start of a European expansion in conjunction with the continued push for developers and sites to adopt the Open Graph Protocol. At the event a number of interesting statistics were announced by Zuckerberg and the other executives.

The major announcement was that Facebook has now reached 26 million unique users in the UK. Also announced was 50% of all “Likes” originate from within Europe, which is about 50 million out of the reported 100 million likes so far, an early indicatator of the popularity of the Social Plugin platform released at f8 a few months ago.

Mark Zuckerberg talking about the new Facebook Open Graph API in London

During his introduction Mark Zuckerberg talked about the interesting applications that he’d seen at the Facebook Hackathon the previous day, and reiterated what was said at the f8 conference, how important the Open Graph and Social Plug-ins are to enable social experiences across the web and how easy it is to implement. He also talked a bit more about the Instant Personalisation feature that has recieved so much critisism in recent weeks, explaining that the reason for it is to allow users to have a seamless and frictionless social expericence while browsing other sites than Facebook, removing the need for them to “Connect” or “Login” to Facebook in order to see a the site in a social context.

Mark Zuckerberg talking about the new Facebook Open Graph API in London

After Zuckerberg’s keynote several high profile partners were brought on stage to discuss their success stories on the Facebook Platform, amongst them was Gustav Söderström, VP of Products from Spotify about how they used the platform to create a new generation of social music application.

Mike Vernal, Platform Engineering Manager

Mike Vernal spoke about all the new technology innovations in the Graph API and the Social Plugins, he talked about the evolution of the platform and a number of other things to help developers understand the latest offerings from Facebook.

Joanna Shields, VP of Sales and Business Development, EMEA

Joanna Sheilds has recently taken on the role of Sales and Business Development in Europe, she spoke about how important it was for Facebook to continue it’s expansion in the EU and talked about the ways they will be engaging with the developer community to help the platform grow.

Mark Zuckerberg, Ethan Beard and Mike Vernal chatting in the Q&A

At the end Mark Zuckerberg, Ethan Beard, Mike Vernal and Joanna Shields sat and answered questions from the room full of press and developers, amongst the topics talked about was the new “Credits” system that Facebook has been testing with a select number of partners such as Zynga and PlayFish, all they revealed was that they are working on fine tuning the payment methods to make it as frictionless as possable to end users and that they would be talking more about it in the coming months, they did say however that eventually the Credits platform will be open to all developers to use in their applications.

In response to a question about a Location API and a set of services built around a users Location Zuckerberg simply answered that they were working on their Location services but offered no timeframe for when we will begin to hear more about them.

Zuckerberg was also asked about the 5,000 friend limit on all Facebook accounts, to which he explained that it was not high on the development list since not very many people had over 5,000 friends in real life, and explained that the reason for the limit in the first place was due to people with high volumes of friends having a poor experience due of the sheer amount of friend data that needed to be processed on each page request.

The event marked a good turning point for all European based Facebook Developers and it will be good to see more of a Facebook presence outside of their Palo Alto offices in California.

On Sunday a few friends at Miniclip and I attended the Facebook Hackathon 2010, during which it was our task to develop a Facebook Application using the new Graph API in a little under 6 hours and have it judged by Mark Zuckerberg Ethan Beard and Mike Vernal from Facebook.

Our application, codenamed “MiniPlay”, allows users to place themselves at the centre of the gameplay by giving them a number of short and engaging games using their friends as characters, the more games they play, the more games they unlock, and the more awards they get. Unfortunately by the end of the evening we only got about 75% of the way through the first game, but managed to create a framework to allow us to easily add games to the application. Whilst we were hacking away Zuckerberg came around to have a chat about what we were doing and wanted to know what we thought of the platform in general, and where they could improve.

At the end of the Hackathon we all had to present the application to Mark Zuckerberg, I drew the short straw to demo the application in front of the Facebook Executives and a room of about 60 other developers, it was quite a surreal experience having the attention of one of the industries most influential thinkers for a few minutes.

The best 3 applications would get a chance to demo their apps on stage at the Developer Garage the next day, but unfortunately, as much as Mark seemed to be really into social gaming, we didn’t make it into the top 3.

Even though our application didn’t get into the top 3 it was a great experience and gave us all some ideas about how to leverage the Graph to build better, and more social applications.

MiniPlay game selection screen

Buddy Lineup Game

The Team Miniclip Room

Ben being interviewed by the resident Developer Garage film crew

Mark Zuckerberg hanging around for a chat before the presentations

Simon and Ben relaxing before the final demo