If you have a web site or service that appeals to the younger web-savvy demographic, you are basically crazy if you do not build a Facebook application for it. We are building our first Facebook application at the moment and have been impressed with just how super easy it is. If you make the Facebook application super simple and virally attractive to Facebook users, its about the quickest way gain a massive amount of users out of anything that you can currently achieve with the internet.

The number of applications available is exponentially growing. The ones that bubble to the top are starting to be worth money, as just like traditional web applications, if they have a large number of users on board, that is worth money - regardless of whether it exists inside the bounds of Facebook or not. Because Facebook allow developers to include their own sponsored advertising listings in their applications, its completely up to the developer as to how they want to try to generate income from their apps.

This Christmas application showed up in the Facebook Developers Discussion board, listed on Ebay for US$6600, with members remarking “great another 10 day old app trying to get 6 figures”. The author responds with “Have another look - it’s 4 figures, then a decimal point, then another 2 figures. That’s a 4 figure sum. Hopefully it’ll go for more than that though? I reckon there’ll be over a million users by 1st Dec”. There is a lot of this caper going on at the moment.

Basically, once these developers understand the simplicity of building Facebook apps, they are quickly pushing out new ones and listing them on Ebay as little as just a week after launch. This is only made possible by Facebook being the perfect platform to virally spread applications, allowing them to attract large numbers of users super quickly, creating an immediate dollar value.

If you are a lover of high end Hi-Fi equipment, as I know the team at Quids Technology are, then check out Dreamtheatre.

Dreamtheatre is a massive database containing detailed specifications on virtually all available high-end Hi-Fi/AV equipment. Awesome for enthusiasts who wish to compare and contrast different models before making an expensive decision. No, its not an online store or some kind of partnership with major retail outlets. Its purely a clean, free information service with the intentions of being useful to people.

I went and checked this popular event out on Tue 6. This is basically a massive melting pot where heaps of up and coming web developers and entrepreneurs get the courage to get up on stage and present their idea to everyone. Originally, it used to be a really informal/niche type event just consisting of a few geek developers. Now its grown enormously and 400 people attend, so things are a bit more serious. For example, representatives from Google and Facebook spoke about some new stuff they are both respectively working on. The Google girl seemed pretty fixated on the technological terms, the essence of what I got from her was “we’re working on these new things, and it will use AJAX and DHTML and everything, it will be really cool”. That was pretty funny.

The Facebook girl had some interesting things to say though. The most exciting thing I got out of Facebook’s news was that they are trying to partner with third party sites to bring in external snippets into the News Feed. For example, if you purchased a book from amazon.com, perhaps your Facebook news feed would say “Aaron purchased Chopper from amazon.com - click here to buy a copy for yourself”. I loved that idea and think it will go a long way. Their main driver was basically that if your friend buys or does something, then you are probably reasonably likely to be interested in doing the same. So it should attract a much higher conversion rate compared to say traditional contextual advertising such as Adsense.

I saw David Karp, founder of tumblr speak. He was a pretty energetic and passionate guy. He recently raised $750k of Series A funding. Definitely the whole investment scene is on a whole different level over there. Tumblr is basically like a simpler, steamlined and hosted alternative to something like Wordpress. Its just basically a more user friendly way to blog things. Its super quick to sign up to, super quick to use and start posting too. But that’s about as much as I can get from it. It doesn’t revolutionise anything, but it does improve something already in existence, or make it somewhat easier and more efficient. Obviously Spark Capital and Union Square ventures considered that to be worth throwing $750k at. This aspect of New York is probably the most amazing. That so many seemingly simple/generic ideas can attract quite a lot of money. Networking is critical and the first thing these young developers do is try to get mentioned on the prominent US/Silicon Valley blog sites. Once they’re in that little loop, if the product is reasonably good, it just snowballs on from there. There are so many enthusiasts over there who will just sign up to something to give it a shot and play with it.

Jeff Han from Perceptive Pixel presented and I would say that his presentation was by far the most impressive of the group. He is in a niche field effectively competing with similar technologies from Microsoft.

Then this thing was presented, Sleep.FM. Full credit to the guy for getting up there and presenting to the large audience. He certainly believed in his product. Basically, Sleep.FM lets people send messages to you via the internet to wake you up. So the guy was like “Do you sleep? Do your friends sleep? Right. Then Sleep.FM will help them because everyone needs to wake up, right?”. It reminded me exactly of the quote in the movie Office Space “You see, its a conclusion mat, and you would like jump to it”. They do have some interesting plans though to manufacture some “smart” physical alarm clocks that you could put on your bedside table, and it would be monitoring the internet to receive notifications from the Sleep.FM service. This is where I think this whole idea has more potential. But the whole time, I just couldn’t work out why you wouldn’t just say leave MSN Messenger open when you sleep. Its basically the same thing. But being New York, it might just attract $750k in VC funding, you just wouldn’t be surprised over there!

Probably the best thing that I got out of this event was a real ground-level appreciation for the level of enthusiasm and interest that the whole web 2.0 scene has over there. It would be really exciting to have so many passionate developers and entrepreneurs in the one room in Canberra. However, it also made me realise that the guys over there are no different whatsoever to us guys here in Australia doing exactly the same stuff. It made me appreciate the talent we already have here in Australia and realise that you don’t need to be based in New York under the spotlight to get your idea up. Sure it might help, but its also more competitive over there and the playing field is more heavily saturated.

It gave me some renewed energy to basically make things happen in Australia and put the throttle down even harder. Because the group of smart guys that I work with have all the skills and passion of anyone we saw at the New York Tech Meetup. I ended up coming away from the meet just seeing all the NY Meetup guys as equals and great people passionately dedicated to their field just like we are. So that’s basically the world’s web 2.0 epicentre, minus Silicon Valley and sure, it wasn’t some whole big different amazing world, just a bunch of hardcore geeks doing what we’re doing. Inspiring and motivational to say the least.

You know there is a serious skills shortage going on when you see contractors on 150k asking “How do you tell how much memory my computer is using?” and you answer “Oh Mate, you just go into Task Manager and it tells you all that etc..”.

Yes I’m serious.

Actually, I’ve seen a fair bit of this kind of caper lately. There is this new wave of .Net “specialists” coming through the ranks. The problem is, their computer experience has been purely limited to Visual Studio and within - they have never *really* used a computer and have virtually no sys-admin/power-user type experience whatsoever. Seriously, so many of them have only ever loaded up Visual Studio and studied .Net books. They’ll say “Oh is that how you copy a file? I only know how to do it using the built-in Microsoft .Net copy file wizard. I didn’t realise there was a manual way - whoa that’s hardcore - but I still prefer the Microsoft way, .Net is the best at everything.”. Yes these idiots have a permanet set of blinkers on. You can’t underestimate the importance of getting people with broad computer experience in a whole range of different environments enough - these “It has to be .Net” fanatics can be next to useless in so many practical situations.

The upshot of the skills crisis is that those with actual real skills can demand a fortune and the companies are paying it. It would literally blow for businesses though. Japan’s IT market is totally the opposite - its so competitive over there, every Japanese kid is born with technology in their hands and so there is no shortage of tech-savvy kids. The wages are so much lower and in my opinion you would be crazy to go to Tokyo and bust your gut in the IT industry, unless you secured a top end position with an international company based in Tokyo that paid at international rates. Over there, you are far better off doing something you purely enjoy the most, because the money will probably be the same or better.

In a way, I really think that the Australian IT industry needed this injection though. If the wages were the same as they were 5 years ago when I was in Newcastle, there is no way whatsoever that many talented IT people would be dedicating their working days to large companies and Government departments. The top guys in IT have worked very hard and could have been doctors or done any degree at uni they’d liked. If the wages were like they were back then, those with an entrepreneurial streak would be far better off taking a risk and starting up their own businesses. But the way it is now, it kind of sucks them in to hanging around for a bit longer and a bit longer purely because of the money.

Drive an RX8 right now and go on multiple overseas holidays per year while still paying a house off no worries? Or go back to eating bread and water to start that idea off that you are so passionate about? It takes serious balls in a market like this to do the latter, but I can truly admire those who take that risk, as longer term, you can’t work in a job forever if you have that streak of passion inside you.

Those extraverted java hackers from Atlassian are at it again. Today is their Cutlassian Pirate day. Its a treasure hunt style event where they run around Sydney, dressed like pirates, completing certain tasks off a checklist to receive points for their efforts. A mate of mine, is heavily involved in the action, belonging to the Dirty Long Johns team. I wish them the best of success in today’s activities!

The last I heard was that they were just kicked out of the Google building by Google Security. The Security guy came down and found a bunch of pirates in his foyer and gave them the boot. Who wouldn’t?

This is nothing unusual for Atlassian. They have the most packed social calendar of any IT organisation that I know. Keep up the great work team.