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Speaking at Widget Summit

tyler@linux.com published on 15 October 2007 This upcoming tuesday (October 16th) I'll be speaking on Facebook Development to what will presumably be an audience of "widgeteers" (as I'll call them).
According to Wikipedia, a web widget is "a portable chunk of code that can be installed and executed within any separate HTML-based web page by an end user without requiring additional compilation."

Following this definition, most of Slide's products are "widgets" per se, but our Facebook applications don't necessarily fall under this category of "web things," as they are in a category unto themselves by integrating into the Facebook Platform whenever and wherever possible.

I'll be speaking on some of the differences between normal "widget" development on the web in contrast to Facebook "apps." As the session page notes, I'll be covering some of the topics like:
  • Walk-through the functionality of a basic Facebook application.
  • A brief explanation of Facebook networks including cities, colleges, companies, and groups of friends.
  • The benefits of Facebook markup over a fully-hosted solution.
  • Enabling important integration points such as user dashboard, user profile, and social news feed.
  • When to use requests and alerts, and the proper etiquette for these interactions.
I'm really looking forward to talking in a slightly different capacity than usual, as "my usual audience" is developers who are really interested in Facebook application development at other venues like at Graphing Social, the Facebook Developer Garage: Palo Alto and other mini-conferences, hackathons, and meetups. At Widget Summit I'll be speaking about a bit higher-level concepts, indirectly related to development, to an audience of product managers, entrepreneurs and folks generally interested in how to get in on the Facebook Platform.

Widget Summit will be at the Mission Bay Conference Center at UCSF is located at 1675 Owens Street, just off the 280 freeway in San Francisco (directions). I'm really looking forward to the event, if you can make it out today, our fearless leader Max Levchin will be giving a keynote of sorts this morning at 10 a.m. which should definitely be insightful and entertaining to say the least. I'll be there tuesday to speak, so if you can make it, come for both days!