Nudge win London Hackathon as judged by Mark Zuckerberg

Toby, Mark, Iskandar and Geoff at the Facebook Garage London

Ever tried to go to a Facebook party and found the tube lines were down? Our entry in the recent Facebook Developer Garage London Hackathon saves you the pain.

The hackathon gave us 5 hours to write a cool Facebook app that used the new Open Graph API Facebook recently unveiled.

TubeWarning (http://www.tubewarning.com) checks your Facebook events and two hours before an event checks the tube lines for you.  If they are down you get a nice email telling you what the problems are. Nice, simple and it just works.

Mark Zuckerberg said to me the next day “I told David Cameron about your app this morning, and he thought it was pretty cool!”.

Cool indeed. Thanks Mark!

Toby presents on stage

Tube Warning in action - thanks to the winning team which consisted of Pankaj Naug, Rafal Wieczorek and Steve Folkes.

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.