A fascinating insight into how this mighty piece of software came about.

I hardly noticed, but the 3 year anniversary of K! passed the other week. And I didn't even get my blog a present or anything. The very first post is here.

Happy 3rd birthday, K!

I was thinking about how to best represent connections between people in my Six Degrees of Separation Facebook application and Paul Crabtree recommend I get in touch with Moritz Stefaner as he had something that would fit very nicely indeed.

And he most certainly did; the relation browser was exactly what I wanted to do, but better. If you have a Facebook account, install the application, and go to the Show Network tab you'll see what I mean.

This piece of SQL is perfect for finding which query is running at any particular time, especially if you want to find what it is that's running very slowly.

sp_who2

This should return a list of what's running, including process ids (in the first column). Find out what's causing all the trouble and enter it's id after spid = below:

DECLARE @Handle binary(20)
SELECT @Handle = sql_handle FROM
  master.dbo.sysprocesses WHERE spid = 55
SELECT * FROM ::fn_get_sql(@Handle)

Exponetic's first Facebook application, Six Degrees of Separation is apparently the fourth fastest growing app over the past week, according to Adnomics. The full league table is as follows:

Hopefully the trend will continue and I can keep adding new features.

The "Six Degrees of Separation" application
Exponetic Facebook developers
"Six Degrees" application statistics on Adnomics
The "Six Degrees of Separation" application

Everyone's been either copying and pasting or writing from scratch some code to add "Invite friends" to their Facebook apps, but now there's a simple tag that they've provided. It's currently in beta and, knowing Facebook, is bound to change and break everything a few times, but it's very easy to use:

<fb:request-form action="invite.php"
method="post" type="trust" content="Invite
friends to trust you<fb:req-choice
url='http://apps.facebook.com/i_trust'
label='Add iTrust' />"
image="http://apps.exponetic.com/itrust/
_img/iTrust-logo-magenta-small.gif">
  <fb:multi-friend-selector
actiontext="Select friends" />
 </fb:request-form>

(Note the slightly dodgy <fb:req-choice> tag inside the content attribute.)

We're now using it at Exponetic on our second Facebook application, called iTrust.

Exponetic, Facebook developers in London
iTrust
Six degrees of separation

We've started developing Facebook applications at Exponetic and our first properly launched project, "Six degrees of separation" has passed 5000 users in under 9 days of live time. The growth has been quite amazing and still going.

Next steps are to do a bit more development on this app and there are a few more in the pipeline

Exponetic Facebook application development, London
The "Six degrees of separation" Facebook application