Learning2.0 : Journey to about2findout.com

FriendsIQ is a social quiz application you can find on Facebook here. It tests your FriendsIQ, which is the sum of what you know plus what your friends know.



How does it work?

On the main screen you see your own score (a FriendsIQ is expressed as x = y + z with x your total score, y what you answered, and z what your friends answered for you. You also see how much you gave and up to 10 friends of you gave to other users.

Below the logo is the main menu to get you to the about page, and the questions page. On the welcome screen you also see outstanding help requests from friends who delegated a question to you.

On the questions page, you see your 5 questions, or at least a short version of it. You have the option to solve it yourself, or ask a friend. If you ask a friend the request is valid for one week. After that you can generate a new question with the 'new question' button. You also get to see up to 5 oustanding help requests from your friends.

Every time a question is answered correctly or wrongly by either you or a friend, the background color will show, and you can generate the next question.


On the question page, you have one of 5 types of questions taken from the about2findout.com site. At the bottom you see if you are answering the question for yourself or for a friend. Every correct answer gains a point, every wrong answer subtracts a point.

I hope you all have great fun finding out your friendsIQ!

Labels: about2findout.com, friendsiq

I've been working on a Facebook application that uses trivia questions from this site. I intended it to be a real social application, so not just another way of doing trivia quizzes on your own just like you can do on about2findout. It's called FriendsIQ, and it tests the combined smarts of yourself and your network of friends, and above all your capability to know what to ask to who.

I found that debugging a social application takes more time than debugging a regular one, specially since you're not allowed to have a multitude of Facebook users to test with. I'm still working on some bugs.

There are two ways to create a Facebook application: in FBML (Facebook's own markup language) or via an iframe. An iframe is basically a piece of the browser window that gets its content from an independent other site. And that's what I used. So on FriendsIQ, what you see is actually pages that are on my own site about2findout.com within the Facebook canvas. Either way you first have to register your application on Facebook and apply for an application and secret key. (And that is fast and free.)

As the site is written in asp.net, I needed components to create Facebook applications on that platform. I wasted a day trying to get the Facebook Toolkit to work. It's an open source project on Codeplex, and a further evolution of Microsoft's toolkit. And it might be a great thing, but it's just too damn hard for a non-die hard programmer to get it to work, specially since Facebook itself has changed quite a lot. The samples don't work, and there is no documentation to get you started. You need to search for hours on the internet to figure out how it works. So I leave the toolkit for those who know how to read the source code and figure it all out, and switched to the much simpler Facebook.NET, also hosted as an open source on Codeplex. I got the major things working, although the new way of handling feed messages is not supported in this project (yet).

Here are some links that really saved me hours of headaches and got me started:
http://www.stevetrefethen.com/blog/VSNETStarterKitForNikhilKotharisFacebookNET.aspx
http://www.nikhilk.net/FacebookNET.aspx
http://www.marketing-ninja.com/old-stuff/why-im-switching-to-facebooknet-from-the-facebook-developers-toolit/
http://www.marketing-ninja.com/old-stuff/5-facebooknet-development-tips/

Labels: about2findout.com, facebook, facebook.net, friendsiq

I'm on holiday this week, so after our 3 night trip to visit Bucharest (I made a quiz on it), I found some time to create the League of Smartypants!
The site has lacked a purpose for a long time. Every game needs a goal and just the most points is not enough to stimulate most people. So from today onwards, you can earn a color in the League of Smartypants. The colors are similar to the belts in karate or judo. You automatically get a new Smartypants grade when you comply with the prerequisites for it. For now blue is the top color, with brown and black reserved for future use once the site grows.

	White	You need 100 points.
	Yellow	You need 200 points.
	Orange	You need 500 points and need to have authored 10 questions.
	Green	You need 1000 points and need to have authored 20 questions.
	Blue	You need 2000 points and need to have authored 50 questions.
	Brown	Not available yet.
	Black	Not available yet.

Labels: about2findout, smartypants

Yahoo has a lot of experience optimizing image size for web sites. An image such as your logo that is just smaller in size but as good in visibility can save a lot of bandwidth, and make your site load faster. Yahoo now put their expertise available via the site smuchit.com. On that site you can upload or point to images, and they will get optimised.

I tried it on my site's images and got 23% improvement. It's a free tool.

Labels: images, smushit, Yahoo

September was a record month. Top day was 25th September with 485 visitors. In total there were 8932 visits, with an average of almost 10 pages per visit. Lots of new registered users too.

It didn't come about just like that: the top weeks I had Google Ads running for 4 euro per day. Just the same, I'm very glad with the results. But it does show the limits of the site, some of the top days I noticed the site was down for 15 minutes because of the higher traffic.

This month I won't run any advertisements, just to see what is left when not promoting the site.

Labels: about2findout.com, google analytics