Facebook World Hack and Hacking on the Beach

Well not quite, but I really enjoyed meeting a great bunch of Spanish developers at the Barcelona leg of the Facebook World Hack Tour. Thanks to Simon Cross and the Facebook team for putting on a great event, throwing together around 200 devs. A great platform to show off Pusher. The day was focused on learning about and working with the Facebook APIs; mainly the power of Open Graph and the available gaming features. Facebook had some great prizes to give away. It was also great to see teams exploring Pusher, and hacking some fantastic ideas. I had a ‘Best use of Pusher’ prize to award at the event. I really enjoyed the live auction site created by the livebidr.com team; within the time they created an auction site and used Pusher to allow people to bid in realtime, making a great live demo! The Urbanstep team used Pusher to add a feature to their existing bus tracking app, allowing you to publish your realtime position to your friends. However, I awarded my prize to Ackbar who created a game on Facebook called TankSiege. Oscar (of Ackbar) created the TankSiege multiplayer realtime game within 6 hours. He was new to Pusher so it was great to see him start from scratch, quickly pickup and use Pusher to power a really nice game in such a short time. He proved how easy Pusher is to use and how quickly you can benefit from the elegance and power of the platform. The Facebook World Hack Tour is off to Moscow on 1st October, so if you get a chance sign up now. I’ll see you there!