It's been almost two days since Athens' first Facebook garage event and I'm eventually finding the time to sit down and write something about it.
So this Friday, the first Facebook Garage Event took place in Athens. At first an overview of the web's evolution was presented and some brief historic and statistical facts were given on web, web2.0, adoption, AOL, yahoo, ..., Google maps and youtube but things were getting a lot more interesting as the event went on.
So next we had a brief discussion on the facebook platform and it's basic characteristics like the massive distribution offered by the platform to any application that is built on it, the Fast experimentation cycles but also had a look to its negative ones like its constant changes of application policies. Then we dived a bit deeper and talked about its architecture, supported and unsupported development languages and other ways that you can interact with the platform.
Then Nikolas Kokalis presented the Anatomy of An Application, talking about his experiences, challenges and problems, in developing a successful Facebook application (Perfect Match) with over 2 million users, which was developed as his Stanford Facebook course thesis. Only one-line status messages can be added to user statuses from apps... bigger ones must be approved from users.
The most interesting session of the event though, was the one about Virality. Hose Brotons explained why virality is an Art that requires a ton 
of Science and presented ways any Facebook application developer could take advantage, to make an application viral. He then went on and talked about ProductMadness efforts in building successful Facebook applications as well as their future plans on their Viral Tuning application coming out very soon.
Finally Facebook application developers were given the chance to present their work on the event. The apps that were presented were Greek Namedays kerasmata and of course my very own mySidebarBook. You can see how George Jiralis captured my presentation here. From the feedback I got it seemed that everyone liked it. There were a few as well that were wondering why don't I use it to make money from it. What do you think? You can find more information and photos of the event here.
More to come later...