Facebook Hackathon Lights

Facebook Hackathon!

I was lucky enough to attend the Facebook Hackathon developer conference today at RichMix in Central London. It was a day of technical presentations, all mobile development (and Facebook!) related. Most demos pushed the new functionality of Open Graph, a protocol that allows developers to connect their webpages with Facebook, and in particular, a Facebook users timeline. It looks like a very effective way of increasing the reach of a social-related web application.

I got to meet some really interesting people, including Jonathan Matus, a Facebook employee who is also involved in the Core Mobile Web Platform Community Group.

Among many other things, Jonathan demoed Ringmark, an interesting Acid-test style site specially designed to test mobile browser capabilities. Access http://rng.io from your mobile device to see how it performs.

I was also give a copy of Grouped, a book by Paul Adams which investigates “how small groups of friends are the key to influence on the social web” – should be an interesting read!