We’ve been working with Luke Razzell from i-together for a few months now, supporting the Blog Friends facebook app with ongoing updates. With the app having been live for about 5 months now, we thought it’d be great to spruce things up a bit and take advantage of the latest features of facebook’s API.

Blog Friends V1 amounts to a significant re-write of the entire front-end along with major portions of the back-end. The app is now effectively a full-blown feed-reader, entirely within facebook, and is currently the most advanced facebook app we know of (or so our users tell us).

I’m beginning to think we’re getting a bit of a reputation for quick service! User-generated television network Sumo. tv approached us to produce a facebook application to coincide with a number of press releases…

… of course, being Christmas the obvious thing was to make an advent calendar application, giving us just a couple of days to design, test and release the app! Thanks to Adam from Sumo, we had a pretty open brief so Jof was able to design and illustrate the app in a day, with Gavin coding and testing it.

As part of karaoke startup LuckyVoice’s latest marketing campaign, we were approached to produce another facebook app. This time, the brief was to produce an app that’d allow users to build identikit characters based on the karaoke songs they like to sing.

The app itself was fairly straightforward, but the real trick was making the identikit images… with about a billion different combinations, we decided to leave the task to our XCalibre servers via awesome open-source command-line image-editor ImageMagick. To get the images, we wrote scripts to subtract the various face components and add them together on the fly, creating truly horrifying hybrids ; )

A quick bit of facebook fun for karaoke startup LuckyVoice. Using LuckyVoice’s extensive song database, the app allows you to set your mood by choosing song lyrics. The app was designed and built in a couple of days.

Two weeks ago we were approached by Luke Razzell of i-together.com to create a new facebook application called Blog Friends. Luke’s goal was to make blog-reading and discovery easy… and yet the server-side aspects of filtering keywords against users’ social networks meant for tough server-side coding. So naturally we said yes!

The genius of the application was the social network filtering, but this presented a lot of serious challenges - especially for the servers.  Thankfully our friends at XCalibre came up trumps and supplied us with a dedicated database server along with a couple of beta elastic-computing “flexiscale” virtual servers.