A new year for Facebook Developer Garage London

Facebook Developer Garage London continues to evolve.  I founded the group back in August 2007 (seems such a long time ago now) and handed over to a new chairman Josh March last October. Each month 60 to 80 developers and entrepreneurs gather to discuss the latest  on the social network platform.

The main trend for 2009 for the garage content is toward comparing application platforms – while Facebook remains the leader in terms of technology, number of developers (now a whopping 660,000 worldwide) and UK usage there is still  a need to provide space to discuss the other platforms – notably Myspace, iPhone, LinkedIn and Bebo.

Nudge continues to support the development community with expert advice from our technical director, Iskandar Najmuddin,- it’s always worth getting along to hear him on What’s new on the Platform and bring your technical queries to.

So, for 2009, I’m looking forward to an even more vibrant developer community in London this year and maybe as a target a million MAU app to catch up with the London community’s biggest star – Playfish. I’m certainly planning to create one for one of our  Nudge clients…

The next event is on 21st January and features speakers from Moshi monsters, iplatform, and Huddle are back to talk about the LinkedIn platform. See you there.

Social network hotness

If you’re thinking global you might want to know which Social Network is hot where.

I played with the new Google Insights tool today to uncover the truth and see which social network people are searching for in which country over the past 30 days. This gives an indication of which social networks are hottest where.

One thing I spotted is that Social Networks aren’t just language communities – Facebook is hot in Columbia but Hi5 rules in Peru despite being neighbours and spanish speaking. Similarly the Portuguese seem mad for Hi5 but the Portuguese speaking Brazilians are sticking to Orkut.

Here are the charts so you can discover things for yourselves – like how Turkey is getting on board with Facebook, that Bebo is really for the cool kids in UK and Ireland and that Mixi rules supreme in Japan…

Facebook Hotness

MySpace Hotness

Hi5 Hotness

Bebo Hotness

 

Orkut Hotness

Friendster hotness

Mixi hotness