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.

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Facebook Class Group

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