New stuff?! Cool!

Well, the quarter is over, and we still haven't caught up in our blogging. So, I'll take the first step and take you through the (tons of) changes we made to PhotoGraph since last Tuesday.

Before diving into our UI changes, let's take a moment to discuss what we've changed in the backend:

• Speed - PhotoGraph is now much faster (and much more usable) than before.
• FBML - We're more integrated into Facebook than before (no more iframe!), so we can have more of that native "look and feel".

And now, the changes that you really care about. Let's start at the top and work our way down*:

• Banner - We have a new one. It is sexy. Don't like it? Tell us! We're still trying to find our voice in this world of Zombies, Vampires, Fun, and Super.
  
• Tabs - PhotoGraph has two views now: explore (the view you're all familiar with), and now one to browse just your starred photos (pictured to left). You can also jump to a friend's starred photos by typing in their name, just like in explore view. We hope this brings us closer to our goal of helping you find the best photos of your friends without wasting your time wading through all the...not so hot ones.
• Star - You'll notice that there is no star in the upper-left anymore. We've replaced it so that now, if you want to star a photo, you simply hover over the photo itself and click on the star that appears. If a friend of yours in the photo doesn't have PhotoGraph, you can invite them right there, too!
• Share Button - A great way to start a conversation about a photo with somebody. (Also, simpler than copy-pasting URLs, although that will work, too.)

In conclusion, give us feedback! Comment here, message us, whatever! Thanks to everybody who's been using us in the last week--you've helped us find some bugs, and told us what we need to work on. (We're working on new stuff, for sure, but I don't want to overpromise. Best thing to do is to use the app, or watch this blog for new features!)

* that's what she said.

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Molson's Facebook Photos Failure

Keep on the lookout for some changes to PhotoGraph! Hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving.

Throughout the Stanford Facebook Class many opportunities have been presented to us. We have collectively seen how interested the corporate world is in Social Networks. Why wouldn't they be? The demographic present on most social networks is very lucrative. Social networks present an opportunity to build your brand in a very trusted and open setting, between friends. We all saw the success of the Dylan app, allowing for self-expression while plugging the upcoming CD. They obviously understood the audience and why users add apps.

When reading about the Molson photo contest, I immediately knew that Molson was walking on a slippery slope. After browsing many photos while developing PhotoGraph I have seen a very prevalent pattern. In the United States Facebook photos is littered with drunken debauchery. Red cups appear in many pictures and there are even dozens of groups dedicated to this college signature. This trend undoubtedly arose from Facebook's background as a college-exclusive social network. College kids don't go on many trips or have families. We study (hardly picture worthy) and party. It seemed funny to me that Molson did not realize that when asking for photos of people partying, they were going to get photos of such drunken mayhem.

Working on PhotoGraph has exposed me to a lot of Facebook photos. They are very fun to browse and laugh at, but nothing to build your brand around.

While social networks have drawn great interest from large corporations looking for new avenues to spread their brand, it is important to understand the cultures of these networks. Social networks are still in their infancy. With the faces of MySpace and Facebook changing rapidly, larger, more mature business are not in a competitive position to venture onto social networks on their own. That is why I think there is room for smaller players that know this arena. As shown by the Dylan app, the smaller consultants who understand the users of Facebook and MySpace can very successfully bridge the gap between big brands and the needs of social network users.

-Mark

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New Version of PhotoGraph

UPDATE: A NEW VERSION OF PhotoGraph IS LIVE.

PhotoGraph got a face lift today! We have been working hard and just pushed out some new, awesome features. The photos should be more recent and relevant. Also, check out the sweet banner and new formatting!

One of the most exciting features that we have pushed out is the search box. Now, if you want to browse a particular friend, just enter their name and click "Go!"
This will load PhotoGraph with a picture of that person and you are free to browse from there. So, if you get stuck in some obscure album, just enter someone you want to see and start over!

Try out these new features and let us know what you think.

-Mark

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Press

Yesterday in class, all the teams presented their creations so far. It was really hectic because we were all writing feedback and trying to think of how we can help each team. With 24 teams to present, that makes for a lot of feedback and good comments.

Not only were the students taking notes, but so were reporters from GigaOM, VentureBeat, and TechCrunch. This was great exposure for the apps. Check out VentureBeat article here and the TechCrunch rendition here. All in all, PhotoGraph got some good exposure, although it would have been nice to have more than a long list. Focusing on and pointing out some of the notable apps would have better rewarded the more prepared teams. With a long (alphabetical) list of 24 apps, most viewers will just check out the first few. On VentureBeat at least we got a photo! We are still waiting to hear from GigaOM, so stay on the lookout.

Thanks to all our users. We have now blown past 2 million PIDs. If you have anything we could do to make the browsing and starring better, let us know. We have a lot of development ideas for the future, but would love to incorporate your feedback as well.

-Mark

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1 Million

Tonight was a milestone we wouldn't think we'd see for a while. At 1:19AM today, October 31 (with all of us in a chatroom), PhotoGraph indexed its millionth photo. The screenshot you see is actually of how many images are in our database and the two counts were taken less than a second apart(!).

I want to thank everybody who's been helping us out by installing. Browse on!

Rest assured, PhotoGraph has quite a few features planned for the future, so keep your eye on this blog for announcements!

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Facebook LIVE!

UPDATE: OUR APP IS BACK UP. CHECK IT OUT AND LET US KNOW WHAT YOU THINK

Facebook has always been preaching that it is not the social graph. There is some social graph that exists, and Facebook wants to be the best representation of that. It is a pretty simple idea. We each have attributes and relationships with other "nodes". Although Facebook does a good job at being my online social network, it can't be with me all the time like the social graph. So if Facebok is such a good representation of the social graph, why not take it with me everywhere so I can tap its resources at a moments notice? Thinking about this (and being a Facebook junkie for the past month) made me wonder and finally, I decided to try "Facebook Live" (aka being Facebook for Halloween).

Besides everyone thinking they were so funny by poking me, I had a lot of fun. I had small slips of paper that people could write on and I would tape to my "wall". I also implemented a mini-feed for me, keeping track of the happenings throughout the night (mostly posts of "Mark had a drink). The one thing I REALLY wanted to do but wasn't able to was having a Polaroid camera and posting pictures on myself throughout the night.

What was most fun was reading my wall posts the next day. You can definitely see the posts getting more illegible as the night went on. Also, the wall posts were definitely more crass (being a grad school Halloween party) than online. They ranged from nice posts ("Your costume is awesome") to drink gifts references ("X gave Mark a 40!").

If any of you were wondering how much of a Facebook addict I am, I hope this solidified it for you! This class has been a lot of fun and I look forward to growing the PhotoGraph.

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Unexpected Downtime

I suck. Well, me and someone else.

We had a tarbomb go off in our application's root directory (while I was installing a PHP profiler (tell me if you've got any good ones) to make our app more responsive). Unfortunately, this tarbomb also had an index.php, which overwrote ours. All we can say is "lasdhfgqowghilsadjf".

Consider this a mixed blessing--we want our page to be more fluid and AJAX-y anyways, so maybe this can be like a fresh start (for the frontend stuff--all DB code is fine).

What does this mean to you? Well, don't expect much for the next 24-48 hours. Then, expect a new and improved PhotoGraph 1.1 (now with backups!).

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Start Browsing the PhotoGraph!

The ribbon is cut! Here we go! Our team made some great progress this week and are glad to announce that PhotoGraph is live! So install the app and kick the tires. Let us know what is great and what you hate. We want all kinds of feedback so we can quickly iterate and give you the best photo experience on facebook.

Navigating in PhotoGraph is very straightforward. Simply click on one of the thumbnails on the right to load it into the main view. Another three related thumbnails will load. By browsing this way you will discover photos you have never seen and never get the sad feeling of coming to the end of an album. Additionally, you can star a photo by clicking on the small star in the upper left corner of the main photo. Your recently starred photos will be displayed on your profile. Hopefully in the future this will also let the people in the photo know that you found a great photo of them!

You will also notice that much of the facebook photos app functionality is still there. Captions, people tagged, and album will all display. This will help you know "where" you are in the PhotoGraph. Before this feature was implemented I got "lost" many times, seeing photos I didn't recognize and desperately looking for thumbnails containing someone I recognized so I could find my way back to familiarity. It was fun.

So check out the app, invite your friends to join and start getting lost in the largest photo network in the world.

-Mark

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FILO

Hack hack hack. That's the sound we made all of yesterday and into this morning. Avi worked on the frontend, and I worked on the backend. (That's what she said. Yes, I set myself up. You should put your mouth on that.) Mark watched us creepily.

We were the first team to arrive at CS377W yesterday, and the last one to leave. It was kind of scary, too, since it wasn't premeditated. We're working full-time (actually, overtime) to make sure PhotoGraph is stable for you! Keeping track of all your friends and photos isn't as easy as it sounds...

While Avi struggles with the starring feature in IE, I've discovered some bugs in Facebook's API. (I said to Avishai last night "Sometimes I think we're the only people in the entire world who use FQL for photos.") I kid, I kid. Despite its shortcomings (lack of count, lack of sorting, occasional timeouts), FQL is extremely powerful, and without it, PhotoGraph could not have the features that it will have soon.

As the final few teams trickled out of the classroom, I realized that we last one. Yesss, we were a stack! First In, Last Out. (And I realized I'm a huge nerd.)

Seacrest out.

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T minus...

Well, it's been a longgg weekend. I have done exactly 0 work for other classes/obligations (not proud of it, but it was necessary), and learned a lot of PHP/MySQL in the past 72 hours. Unfortunately, this meant that much of my diet consisted of ramen and Swedish Fish. (I got the Facebook container--it's not Nalgene brand--by doing some user testing there last year.)

It's pretty cool writing this application (from a programmer's perspective), since the code has such a tangible result on such an important social medium. I think I speak for everybody on the team when I say that our application will change the way you discover photos of your friends. Even while we're building the app, we often have to pull ourselves away from getting sucked into a never-ending stream of photos!

Of course, the reason we've been pushing so hard lately is because we're going to launch soon(!). We're all anxious to have real users (and a larger sample set than 3 for when we need to make decisions) and look forward to everybody's feedback.

Keep an eye out here for the big news!

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PhotoGraph - Finishing up Development

"Good worker, Hard worker, Terrific" has been striving hard to get the first iteration of PhotoGraph out. For being such a structured platform and having such simple apps, there is a lot to code. There are so many points of contact with the user, from news feed posts to notifications, that have to be tested and monitored. Luckily, our team fits with our name, and we have been making some great progress. We think that people will love browsing the PhotoGraph, we sure have.

PhotoGraph is a photo browsing, discovering, and tagging application. Unlike the Facebook Photos application, you can browse across albums and friends. While displaying a picture, three related thumbnails are shown and the user can simply click on the next image he or she wants to see. Currently, relevance is determined by who is tagged in the photo and the album it is in, although we are definitely thinking of ways of improving this in the future.

One of the great features of the application is starring. If you like a photo, click on the star in the upper left. Starring photos serves two purposes:

1. Let people know what pictures you like and easily access your favorites in the future.
2. Build a database of "Best Photos" of you when your friends star photos your are in.
   

We are really excited to launch and are currently tying up loose ends. It has been really fun browsing my photos this way. I have come across many photos of my friends I have never seen before. It have been very interesting browsing across my social network. Occasionally, I find myself off in a corner, looking at good pictures of people I don't know in my network. Also, since relevance is determined by who is tagged in the photo, you can get "stuck" in pockets of photos that have no people in them. Happy browsing.

-Mark

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Life at Facebook University

Being a student in the Stanford Facebook Class has been a blast. Homework now consists of installing and interacting with Facebook applications. My profile is so cluttered now I am getting wall posts saying, "Mark, you have wayyy to many apps." As my friends scan their news feeds, surely they think I let a 14 year old girl take over my profile.

It has been exciting being involved in the mass idea orgy that has been the last 2 weeks. With over 80 people in the class, there are sure to be some awesome apps. My team is "Good Worker, Hard Worker, Terrific" and yes, that is from The Office. We have been mulling over many creative ideas, some pressing Facebook's terms of service to the brink.

For our first app, we decided to go up against the big guns, Facebook's juggernaut photo application. Our app, PhotoGraph, will be a more intuitive way to browse and discover photos in Facebook. More on the development and app details to come.

Join our Facebook Group
Facebook Class Group

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