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

There has been lots of hubbub about Facebook’s new OpenGraph protocol over the last few weeks, and as one might expect, the privacy advocates jumped on Facebook as soon as it was announced. However from a developers perspective, the OpenGraph API is great (despite the lack of documentation).

They have a point however, the privacy settings in Facebook are very confusing and convoluted, if you don’t know where to look or what to look for it is almost impossible to know what data is being shared, let alone lock it down. The average user wouldn’t know where to start, putting all the settings on one page would be a step in the right direction, instead of scattering them all around the place.

And of course, the issue of the “default” is a very important one, people that didn’t change the default settings should never have been made public simply due to lack of knowledge. An open profile should be opt in, not opt out.

One of the key things that many articles and comments I’ve seen about the new protocol is that the “Instant Personalisation” feature (which is on by default) is the worst thing since the last bad thing Facebook did. What many of them forget to mention is that these sites can only access your public information – that is, the information that is set to “Everyone” in your Facebook Privacy Settings.

Recommendations to turn off the Instant Personalisation feature doesn’t really solve the wider issue – turn it off and you stop a handful of sites from accessing your information, but leave millions of other applications and sites to access the same information freely, or put another way you’re stopping the fountain but leaving the waterfall.

But as worrying as the privacy concerns are – it pales in comparison to stories like the one posted on AllFacebook today titled Facebook Knows That Your Relationship Will End In A Week. The data described in the article wasn’t sourced from the OpenGraph API, nor is it anything to do with external developers or companies – it is from the data that Facebook collects internally.

“As the service’s engineers built more and more tools that could uncover such insights, Zuckerberg sometimes amused himself by conducting experiments. For instance, he concluded that by examining friend relationships and communications patterns he could determine with about 33 percent accuracy who a user was going to be in a relationship with a week from now. To deduce this he studied who was looking which profiles, who your friends were friends with, and who was newly single, among other indicators.” The Facebook Effect, Kirkpatrick.

The bigger discussion here is whether people should be posting so much personal information on Facebook in the first place, sure it’s good to chat to your friends, share photos, but do you really need to put your home address? Phone number? And if you do, are you really that worried about your privacy? With the level of data warehousing and data mining described in the article, the issue of public vs private isn’t just about what the API allows developers to do, it’s also about what the terms and conditions say Facebook are allowed to do and as more and more people post ever increasing amounts of personal information the less privacy there will be, But no one is being forced to join or share the information, one of the main problems is telling users when to stop sharing.

Since Facebook’s announcement of the Open Graph Protocol and Graph API at the f8 conference a few weeks ago it has been time to re-read the Facebook Documentation and try to work out how the new API’s fit into a few personal and work projects.

As part of that research I decided to fill a void in my development time – I’m forever trying to find the Facebook User ID of the user I am currently logged in as – and it doesn’t help when you have 10+ testing accounts, plus my own personal account.

So I threw together this:

Myfbid.com allows you to login (Using the Facebook OpenGraph API) and it will immediately show you your current Facebook User ID, you can logout and login again with a different account and it will do the same for that one.

No personal data is collected or stored during the process – it simply looks up your User ID and shows it on the page.

Over time I will add some more features, the ability to see your Friends User ID’s perhaps and some other cool things that will help developers.

Hope some people find it useful!

Lloyd brought up a few good points in his response to my previous post titled Life after Graduation, so I thought I would take this opportunity to discuss it in more detail.

Social Media is nothing new, but it’s something that has grown exponentially in the last few years, it’s hard to walk down the street today without seeing some form of Social Media at work, even large news corporations are starting to use Social Media (rightly or wrongly) as a conduit for gathering news worthy stories.

Almost everyone now has a Facebook account, well not everyone, there are only 350 million Facebook accounts and many billions of people on the planet – but chances are most if not all of the people in your group of friends and family will have one. Social Media isn’t just about having an account though, it’s about how you use it.

For recent graduates Social Media can be a very powerful tool to increase your exposure and employability. The technology industry is an extremely fast moving and competitive place, and as everyone says, the more employable you can make yourself, the more chance you have of getting a job.

This is where Social Media comes in, how better to show employers that you are passionate about the industry and show off your talents than taking advantage of some of the most popular tools on the web?

The main goal of all of this is to create a brand for yourself, when someone searches your name in Google you actually want them to find something, your blog, your twitter account, your LinkedIn account , and the content that lives there go towards helping you get your name out there, and gets you associated with the industry.

Blog

Blogs have also been around for years, but I’m surprised how many of my fellow Computer Science graduates don’t even have one! It’s is one of the first things you need to do in order to get your name out there.

Think of something you’re interested in or find interesting about the industry and create a blog about it, use it to share interested things you’ve found on the subject, or add your own opinion to commonly discussed topics.

Use your blog as an avenue to show off some of the work you have done, if you’ve a designer, show off your designs, if you’ve written a cool piece of code, share it, it all helps a potential employer get an idea of the work you are capable of and how passionate you are about the area.

Twitter

Twitter is a fantastic tool to help you drive traffic to your blog and to share interesting links with your followers. While Twitter isn’t going to be able to get you a job, using it will get you more exposure, and at the end of the day that’s what you need to do, get more people to see your work and skills.

Facebook

For most people Facebook is a walled garden, I personally prefer to have my privacy settings as high as they go, but that doesn’t mean that Facebook doesn’t play a key part in using Social Networking effectively. Recently Facebook has opened up many of the News Stream features to behave much like Twitter, meaning that it’s another way to get your name out there.

LinkedIn

If your goal is to use Social Media to get yourself a Job outright then LinkedIn is probably the most important place to start. LinkedIn is a bit like using monster.com except it focuses more on the business relationships you have made – but it doubles as very useful job hunting tool. Fill out as much your profile as you can, take things from your CV and try to sell yourself. From there you can go to the Linkedin Jobs section and apply for some in the same way as you do on monster.com.

To get the most out of LinkedIn I would recommend searching the Groups Directory for groups in the field you want to pursue and join as many as you can. A while ago I joined a PHP Developer group and ever since then I’ve got quite a few recruitment consultants contact me, so it does work!

Having said all this Social Media isn’t just a way to promote yourself, it’s a chance to learn from influential people in the industry, stay up to date on what’s going on and learn new skills.