BarCampOttawa4 is going on today at BitHeads.

International DemoCamp

This was an interesting idea but it didn’t quite get off the ground due to technical issues. The idea was to link the Ottawa camp with BarCampLeeds in the UK using a screencasting tool and skype for audio. Unfortunately we couldn’t get the screencasting portion working and were limited to hearing the presenter and crowd at Leeds give a shout out over the pond. Hopefully the next time the kinks will be worked out, because this is a pretty cool idea.

Building a Facebook Business - Alec Saunders

• Everyone knows that facebook has taken off. Its a great success story.
• Most of the people joining facebook now are age 25+ in the workforce.
• Evolution of the internet Browse -> Search -> Share
• Most apps either share relationships, resources or knowledge
• iotum developed the first facebook conference calling application
• Facebook market research applications
• polls (test your business case via polls)
• ads and pages (market your app to exactly the target market you’re after)
• appsaholic (watch other applications that are in your market and see what they are doing right)
• Ad campaigns (pay for installs)
• Virality is key, don’t underestimate it.
• Google indexes facebook application pages now, so you get free first page results for relevant keywords. Alec’s facebook app page got a pagerank of 8, for free!
• 4info - sms provider
• Facebook vs Open Social
• Getting into facebook early was hard because the platform was changing so often and its still changing to some extent.
• Open Social is similar to that right now, the platform isn’t mature and its hard to achieve exactly what Open Social promises (deploying one app to multiple social networks).