Facebook seminar/presentation

Step 1: Pick one of the applications.
Step 2: Summarize important points of the presentation - about 3.
Step 3: Put down your original thoughts

Stuff from Ben's blog - to keep in mind:
1. Thinking about Implementation.
2. Learning to Identify Good Ideas.
3. User Interface Design and Interaction Design is Important.
4. Understanding the Curse of Success (Scalability).
5. It's okay to Steal (Ideas).

Facebook seminar/presentation blogging assignment

Causes

Points mentioned by the team:

1. Team’s suggestions for improving Causes:

a) Removing trivial causes;

b) Authenticating existing causes by attaching to the charity organization;

c) Introducing tax-exemption for large donors.

I feel that these are meaningful improvements but there will be some difficulties in implementing them.

Regarding the first point, who gets to decide if a cause is trivial or not? A appointed moderator will definitely get flamed for removing causes that can be trivial but people can be passionate about. (Like perhaps ht will flame the moderator for removing "ht needs to buy a lexus" cause. ^_^)

What about causes that don’t need donations, like “Stomp out STOMP for good”? Are those deemed trivial because it is heavily localized to a tiny country and is unimportant to the greater context of the world.

My solution to that is to include a few more categories into causes, such as "fun causes", "ridiculous causes", "selfish causes", or "protest causes" so that causes like ht's lexus and STOMP will be properly categorized, and might even boost the app's readership and members. After all, who wouldn't like to surf "selfish causes" or even post up some of their own? ^_^

Regarding authentication – true, it would greatly benefit individuals who are eager to donate to causes because it saves them the time to research on the organization and the authenticity of the request. An authentication process would allow users to trust the app more.

But it will be a lot of hard work to process all the causes, and who will do that? It can't be a random volunteer because a volunteer might just be "corrupted" and even set up some of his own fake causes. It has to be done by someone trustworthy, or at least a company, if only to have someone specific to blame if thing goes wrong. So who pays? It seems a little too idealistic to expect Causes users to pay for such a service, because I feel that the donors on causes are the "spur-of-the-moment" sort of users, who don't think through their decision much, and probably donates really small amounts each time. ^_^

Regarding tax-exemption, it is definitely a worthy suggestion because I feel that facebook donors deserve to get tax breaks as other donors do. However, disregarding the difficulties of implementing tax exemptions across different countries and their laws, I feel that this is not a very important improvement as large donors often do not donate through Facebook. As I mentioned I feel that facebook donors are people who donate little, often, and without thinking, and the resultant tax exemption would be negligible.

2. Team's suggestion to improve user interface and interaction:

a) Use games to attract and keep players/users interested in causes.

b) list top 5 causes of the category

I really like the games idea. An example that sprang to my mind was : http://www.freerice.com/, where the more you play the more rice gets donated to the UN. However, I realized that eventually it is the onus of the organization to come up with the game, not Causes... hmm.. I wonder if there's a market in making games like freerice.com for some causes and getting a cut of the donations for it...heh heh...

For the top 5 causes for each category suggestion, I feel that it'll definitely be a good idea after I surfed causes according to categories. I don't know how Causes rate their requests, but I seem to get pretty obscure and location specific causes right at the top when surfing the categories of causes.

3. Team's point on effectiveness of Causes as donating platform: Donations are very spread out – so while the app is successful, it doesn't make a big difference to the causes themselves

I agree with the team. I feel that while Causes has a large user base, most of the users do not actively support the causes that they join. People join causes because it is like making a statement - oh, I'm against world poverty, I'm against cruelty to animals. But after a while they forget all about it because it isn’t something that they think about everyday, or really wants to make a difference in.

I think the way to make Causes more prominent in the user's lives is really to implement the games idea that the team suggested. Or perhaps apps in Facebook can work together, for example "Cruelty to animals" causes can be linked to Pet's society, and in-game money earned by the player can be donated in the game to causes... or every purchase of an expensive pet trophy leads to a donation?

Other issues I feel are relevant to the application:

THE BAD: There is a duplication of causes, for example searching pets come up with 384 results, all to do with preventing cruelty to animals. There is alot of confusion for users who want to join or donate to causes. That said, it is a problem that facebook itself faces, for example duplication of groups (198 groups on appreciating Virginia Woolf, more or less the same). I doubt this problem is solvable... >_< Other Comments... I think the team spent a lot of effort for this presentation, and it was fun - esp. Prof Zhao Cong!

Geo Challenge: Love the part on the bots. Its always fascinating what people will do just to rise up in the leaderboards...By the way, the existence of bots had never crossed my mind until this module showed me the power of bots and bot-ing... *enlightened*

Graffiti Wall: I was very surprised that such a simple application had sponsorship from so many different companies. Thanks to the team for choosing this app, I had really underestimated the potential of simple applications before this presentation. I really enjoyed Abel’s comic too, it looked so fun to “play”.

Elven Blood: I like Kian Boon description of the business model: Take a successful app you’ve made, and duplicate it 3 more times. And it worked! ^_^

Oh but I think there's this point about ElvenBlood that really struck me when I was playing it - the game art is not made by the developers! The developers basically just asked for good artists to "donate" their art, so Elvenblood can help "feature" the art, so its a win-win situation.

Come to think of it, its fantastically easy to duplicate the other 3 games in this way since all it takes is some changes into the database (elves change to vampires/mafia, etc etc..) and the story right? Because art is the most time-consuming part of making a new app (assuming you've got the programming up already)... Elvenblood developers are cheaters!!!! >_<