Last night saw Carlos and my first networking event of 2008 and Garrick and Kat’s first ever Quirk related event. And boy, talk about jumping in at the deep end.

With the opening address being given by Juan Franco, CEO of Mentez, it was sure to be a cracker! Juan took us through the ins and outs of the company which showed a strong vested interest in both South Africa, Africa as a whole and, in particular, Turkey. Furthermore, their developer-focused company structure was great to see!

Armand du Preez was up next and took us through the basics (and not-so-basics) of creating a Facebook Application. As a non-developer this was of tremendous interest and I think it’s time I actually bring back my high school and varsity coding and plug a little app together : - ) For old times sake!

Next up was Eben de Wit of Microsoft who gave a very interesting and informative talk on Silverlight (the Microsoft contender to Flash) which looks great despite the fact that it looks to have the same drawbacks as Flash, including poor “searchability” and bulky code; although I do believe it is slightly better on both counts. The other system he spoke about was Popfly, which is Microsoft’s effort to get a foot in the online advertising game. Popfly looks great for new users but I suspect the more experienced will opt for the more IP secure route and without the terms and conditions which come with this software. Otherwise, an excellent piece of software.

Eben was followed by Jason Hoffman, the Joyent CTO, who gave an excellent, albeit technical talk on ensuring scalability. In the process of doing so he let slip that the top 5 applications are all getting in excess of 20 million pages views a day – which is ludicrous! As Jason was saying, this equates to the traffic of a top 50 website but from a target market of a fraction of the size… that really does say something for Facebook and the tremendous potential which applications hold!

Joey da Silva then managed a short Q&A session which saw some very interesting questions coming through.

My question to the panel was “Is the development of Applications sustainable or are we creating a false economy?”

Jason and Juan both replied to this by saying that the investment by big businesses implies that they see massive potential in Facebook. Furthermore, considering that many applications have in excess of 2 million users the ROI experienced by successful apps is massive and quite unparalleled by any other eMarketing service!

My only recommendation to Facebook, (yes, they read GottaQuirk : - P ) is to find some way to aggregate the applications and find a way to limit the number of SPAM application invites which are driving me (and I’m sure you) crazy! A simple way to do this is to require users to vote about how good a particular app is and only once a certain number of people have organically selected to join it (i.e. by seeing it in another’s news feed) AND the cumulative score is above a certain number, can people be invited to join it.