Recently, our Lead Developer, Mike Sherov, contributed to and was mentioned in the release notes of the jQuery 1.7 release. For those unaware, jQuery is a premiere Web technology powering over 49 percent of the 10,000 most visited websites. It is big news for SNAP and for Mike. Here are his thoughts on the subject:

I’ve been doing Web development for years. My humble beginning was at a small agency slicing PSD’s to HTML and CSS. Occasionally, I needed a bit of JavaScript to do a neat effect here and there. For me, JavaScript was like a gateway language; after enough time using it I inevitably started poking around PHP, mySQL, and the full LAMP stack. My skills became refined, and my projects got more complex. One of those projects led me to Cliff Lerner, and I started working with SNAP Interactive in 2005 to build an online dating website.

Development, for me, came in plateaus. I learned a little bit, hit a wall, persevered, and got to the next plateau. SNAP Interactive provided me one of those rare opportunities to persevere. When Facebook Platform launched in 2007 and AreYouInterested.com launched later that year, I now had to learn how to scale.

The issue of scaling posed a terrifying moment in my development career. I didn’t ever think I would have to deal with the traffic on the scale of millions of hits a month. I remember the first time I tuned MySQL config values, the first time I implemented a memcache layer, the first time I implemented a sharded MySQL table (read about it on Digg), the first time I used xdebug to discover perf bottlenecks in PHP….  Scaling was no straightforward algorithm, no singular epiphany. Rather, it was a grueling tug-of-war, with every development trick getting me a few inches of rope, and every setback drawing me dangerously close to losing my grip on the site.

But I figured it out. Years of trial-by-fire and my personal experience in the trenches of Web development gave me an incredible sense of respect for the underlying technologies powering consumer Internet. After besting many of the challenges of scaling a successful site, I turned to another, now personal, plateau in my development career. I wanted to contribute to an essential Web technology. I wanted to contribute to jQuery.

Heck, I thought I was scared when I started scaling our site. To be sure, scaling our site was *technically* more difficult, but peeking behind the jQuery curtain was downright *spooky*. For me, the jQuery project and all the people who made it are the giants upon whose shoulders I stand. Where did I get off trying to contribute to such a well known and widely adopted framework?

Enter social coding and open source. Luckily for me, jQuery is not some monolithic, guarded fortress of private code. It’s on GitHub. You can fork it, add whatever you want, and ask to submit whatever you want changed. Quick, painless, granular communication. Even if you do not know exactly WHAT you want to fix, jQuery provides a public bug tracker so you can both report and fix bugs. There are style guides to follow, priorities to learn, and best practices to adhere to, but that happens inline, right in the code review process (thanks to GitHub’s slick interface). This is the social networking revolution, right?

For me, contributing to jQuery was as easy as following Paul Irish, Dave Methvin, Addy Osmani, even jqcommit on Twitter. It was as easy as answering some tweets in my own head. As easy as forking the project on a weekend, finding something I could fix in the public bug tracker, and writing some code. Before I knew it, I was submitting a pull request through GitHub.

After doing that a few times, submitting to jQuery became routine. The wall between myself and the next plateau in my career was behind me. The project and the people who were once so exciting and gigantic to me were mysterious no longer. They were just other devs, and I was developing with them. I’m very proud of that.

It’s hard to say that Twitter, GitHub, and the open source ideal had nothing to do with it. I achieved one of my own personal development goals with the help of some talented devs and the new age of collaborative coding projects. I was mentioned in the jQuery 1.7 release. I’m the “greenhorn contributor” under the “jQuery Team” heading (yeah baby!).

Now, after witnessing the power of these amazing new development tools, I’ve never felt more sure of one thing. When I think I am at a personal wall in my development career, it is really only up to me to persevere. The tools are there. I just have to use them.

Happy coding guys!

-Mike Sherov, Lead Developer, SNAP Interactive

The dev team at SNAP is proud of Mike. Well done, good buddy! Here’s to more contributions to open source software! Cheers!

The SNAP Interactive Team

SNAP sent eight (eight? EIGHT!) staffers to the wonderful Bay Area to attend F8 in Sept. Here is Part 2 of our takeaways on San Francisco and the F8 conference.

Walking into F8 was an incredible experience. A huge part of this year’s F8 centered around data visualization, and the first room of the conference did NOT skimp in this department. On one screen was a globe showing new connections between Facebook users in real-time. The thing was firing so fast you couldn’t count the connections. On another screen was a real-time dashboard comparing Facebook interests, comparing stars like Lady Gaga and Rihanna or movies like Pirates of the Caribbean and The Breakfast Club. The number of graphs, pie charts, and animations on the main display was staggering.

The conference hall was less flashy, but the ambience was flawless. F8 gave a very convincing rendition of a young, hip tech conference. We caught some seats and took a SNAP family photo!

Watching the keynote was one part hilarious Adam Sandberg and two parts crazy mind twist. People have been talking about semantic web for ages, but most had never really thought of Facebook as a data company. It seems obvious in retrospect, and, at least at SNAP, we had been talking about the ramifications of the “Like” and the Newsfeed, etc., for quite a bit. The keynote, however, really brought everything together. The new features were concisely presented, and the possibilities seemed endless. Thumbs up all around!

A great thing about conference trips is the additional time to hang out with your team. F8 gave us a few days to get dinner, have a drink, and talk about life. Here’s a photo of us enjoying some of San Francisco’s fine dining!

Folks in the tech sector have such interesting backgrounds, and SNAP is no exception. Just in the group of eight that made the trek out west, we had people from seven different cities, three religions, a surfer, a ballet dancer, a high school pun-club president, an ex-World of Warcraft guild leader, a Belgian National Championship Futsal player, the best high school 3-point shooter in Long Island, an expert Rubix Cube Solver (solved in under 30 seconds!), and TWO guys that can beat Contra without the 30 lives code. Combine that crew with some fine dining and classy venues, and there was bound to be some mischief!

And where better to cause mayhem than the now infamous Sean Parker after party. It’s hard to describe the opulence, but suffice to say this party was definitely the most well-produced party we’d ever attended. Every drink was top-shelf. The venue was dazzling. It wasn’t crowded, and when you decided to take a seat, there was an adorned divan straight out of a 10th century harem. Jane’s Addiction and Snoop Dogg, I mean SNOOP D-O-DOUBLE-G, were there! It seemed like everyone was dancing, and it seemed everyone was a nerd.

Let’s dwell on that point for a minute. After a lifetime of being a nerd, the literal bottom of the social barrel, this party did not compute. How did this happen? How had, after all the years of succumbing to the torment associated with liking nerdy things like math, technology and computers, a party like this come onto our radar? How had what seemed like millions of dollars been spent on a lavish, cavernous bedchamber dedicated to the drunken debauchery of a group of engineers? How had some of the premier artists of the world gathered to entertain us en masse, at the behest of two “application developer” companies? What the hell was going on?

There was just one explanation: tech is now sexy. The party was an exclamation point on decades of literal and figurative development. Finally, with Spotify and Facebook and the whole host of social app companies out there, including SNAP, FINALLY, it is cool to be a nerd. Bravo!

The day following the after-party was the final attraction: the Hack-a-thon! The effects of the top shelf liquor were likely not well received by dozens of groggy web developers as they trekked down to Facebook’s Palo Alto headquarters to dig deep into the new Facebook APIs. For us, the much-needed breakfast before the trip down south provided ample opportunity for brainstorming the perfect gag Facebook app. The task was simple: code the coolest “verb” in Facebook. After an hour of pontificating over verbs long, short, dull, snazzy, and occasionally inappropriate, we settled on “commit”, as in “I just commited some code”. Obviously this would be fully integrated into our github account. I mean, who doesn’t want to show off his or her commits in the new Facebook stream?

Sure, it’s not the snazziest new app, but it works and you can view the code. Head on over to our Lead Dev’s GitHub account to check it out. Here’s a screenie of the app in action:

Disclaimer: Right now you have to be an admin of an application to get it to run on the Facebook Timeline. If you want to poke around the code and make your own app, feel free! Warning: there is limited documentation. Good luck!

Well that about wraps it up for our thoughts on F8. Overall, it was a fantastic experience for us. We got to play around with some powerful new APIs, hang out with the best and brightest in Silicon Valley, party like rap stars, and represent SNAP. Here’s looking forward to the next conference. We’ll be ready!

This year’s F8 introduced a set of features that represent a critical shift in Facebook’s product offering. In our opinion, this is one of the biggest shifts in the history of Facebook, and in modern internet. Let’s review what actually happened.

Facebook now has over 800 million registered users. Those users have been generating interesting content for years. Status updates, photos, events, check-ins, interests, relationships, friends; you name it, they got it. Facebook has spent a long time building the universe of that data, what they think of as a set of “nouns”.

Now it’s time for Facebook to find something useful to do with those “nouns”. They have chosen to focus on “verbs”. We’ve already seen an extremely successful product offering in a form of a verb; the “Like”. Now, Facebook will allow you to do more than “Like” nouns. Before, you could “Like” a movie. Now you can “Watch” a movie. You can “Cook” a meal. “Run” in Central Park. “Read” a book. “Listen” to a song. Opening the floodgates on verbs will increase the amount of possible interactions with nouns by a tremendous amount, perhaps an order of magnitude. That’s more data.

Adding that data is tremendous in itself, but Facebook isn’t stopping there. Focusing on the visualization of that data is key, and that’s what Timeline is about. Timeline attempts to provide a lightweight, aesthetically pleasing way to view your profile. All of your interests, likes, friends, photos, relationships, status updates, your “nouns” and “verbs”, in a way that looks good. It’s simple in concept, and its execution at first glance is quite elegant.

Facebook is not managing the universe of verbs and nouns on its own. That’s where app developers come in. Facebook is already managing some things for you, like “friends”, “photos”, “interests”. Facebook is not currently, however, managing certain important verbs. One verb they are not managing, but others are managing extremely well, is “play”. The way in which Facebook enables a user to “play” has transformed the gaming industry. That is partly because “play” is inherently social. Many other verbs which were slightly less social are now coming into the fold, like “watch”, “listen”, and “read”. We will see similar transformations of the ‘watch”, “listen”, and “read” industries. The message is simple. Social is no longer a class of product. Social is now a part of your product offering. You don’t make “social” apps any more. Now you make apps, and they better be social.

But what if you don’t know what your social verb is? That will be a central challenge for us, and many other companies, when considering the new Facebook. How should we leverage this new universe of nouns and verbs? Do we need to focus on a key verb as a product offering, perhaps “meet”? Is our industry too sensitive to become an instantly social verb?

The next generation of social companies will succeed or fail with their answers to these challenges. Long term, we will need to creatively approach making our products truly social. Facebook has given us the tools to access friend graphs and their associated data in an unprecedented manner. The companies that leverage that data to provide the best user experiences will succeed.

I’m friggin’ excited. New Facebook is sweet. Let’s use it to make our apps even better.

Welcome to the SNAP Interactive Developer blog! We’re a premier social app developer in NYC, and we’re committed to making Silicon Alley one of the best tech communities in the world. Let me introduce you to SNAP:

• We created one of the largest dating apps on Facebook: AreYouInterested.com®. It’s got approximately 50 million installed users, 7 million MAUs* (on Facebook), 700k DAUs* (also on Facebook) and a partridge in a pear tree! No really, it’s that big. You should check it out. (Those MAU/DAU numbers are from AppData as of Oct 14, 2011. See for yourself!)
• We’ve been publicly traded since we launched! No need to wait for our IPO, you can see our stock right here! (Ask our CEO, Cliff Lerner, how to make your tech company public from the ground up!)
• We’ve been making social apps for years. In fact, AreYouInterested.com was in the top 20 apps on Facebook in 2007! Wanna know some other apps that were in the top 20 back then? Super Wall, Top Friends, SuperPoke!, and Bumper Sticker. Remember those? Not many Facebook apps made it from 2007 to 2011. AreYouInterested.com is one of ‘em!
• We’re one of the few companies with a leading Facebook app AND a leading iPhone app! Head over to the app store to check out AreYouInterested.com on your iPhone.
• We just moved into a snazzy new office near Penn Station. Here are some photos:

That’s SNAP Interactive: a publicly traded, well-funded, social app developer. We’re committed to making the best apps around, and this blog is all about how we’re doing it. Subscribe to our RSS feed (check the sidebar on the right!) and stay tuned to hear the latest and greatest from the SNAP dev team.

Until next time!

The SNAP Interactive Team

* Editor’s Note: Please note that Facebook changed the way they measure a Daily & Monthly Active User as of 10/14/11 to only include those who are logged in as active users rather than those who visit the app without logging in.  It’s important to note that this change doesn’t correlate to any actual change or decline in traffic to apps or app usage, but simply represents a change in how the number is reported.