I first remember hearing about the term "social graph" in May while Mark Zuckerberg was on stage announcing the Facebook Platform. That probably wasn't the first time the term was used, but it seems to be the time it entered our collective conscience and started being used with more regularity. At the time, I remember thinking to myself, "wait, what's a social graph?" It seems I wasn't alone in my confusion. The social graph is a reference to graph theory, which in general, if I understand correctly, models connections between things. There's really nothing wrong with this term, but it's math or computer science phraseology and doesn't do very well as a marketing term, in my opinion.

"Now if you showed that diagram to most educated people, they probably would call it a network, and before we talked about social graphs we called them social networks, and you know what -- they're exactly the same thing, and social network is a much less confusing term, so why don't we just stick with it? (Answer: we should, imho.) So if you don't want to sound like an idiot, call a social graph a social network and stand up for your right to understand technology, and make the techies actually do some useful stuff instead of making simple stuff sound complicated." -- Dave Winer

Not everyone agrees with Winer. Robert Scoble posted a response today in which he says that your social network is who you know, while your social graph is who you're connected to based on interests, location, work, etc. "The Social Graph is NOT my social network," Scoble writes. "My Social Network is my friends list. But the Social Graph shows a LOT more than that."

Scoble might be right. Or Winer might be. But semantic arguments aside, I think the first commenter on Scoble's post sums it up nicely:

"When I first heard the term social graph my thought was 'what now?', graph did not resonate at all. It still doesn’t." -- PXLated

Everyone already understood what a social network was -- it's a term we've been using for years. Everyone knows about networking. When you go schmooze with your peers at a party you're networking, not graphing. Most people don't get "social graph" the way they do "social network."

As Tom Morris, a commenter on Nick Carr's post on the debate says, "The fact is that the phrase 'social network data' describes everything that 'social graph' does without having to explain graph theory to those who don't understand it." Yes! Social graph may be a valuable way to talk about this stuff with mathematicians, but it is still a poor choice as a marketing term. I think it's time we retire it (at least in anything that isn't targeted toward computer scientists) and return to saying social network. How about it?

To get started with Nexus, add the app to your Facebook profile. You can choose to generate the graph in either a light theme or a dark theme, as you wish. Once the graph has been generated, you can hover any node to view your friend connections. What's really interesting, though, is that you can click on any node on the graph and view information about your friends and how they relate to other members of your social graph.

A Nexus Graph

For example, clicking on Richard, I discovered he shared commonalities with Jason Calacanis, Michael Arrington, and Robert Scoble. For the most part, these shared interests were in the form of groups that they both belonged to, but they also could be shared activities, music, movies, etc. (For example, both Richard and I are fans of the movie "The Matrix.")

Discovering common interests

You can then click on any one of those shared commonalities and discover other members in your friend graph who also share this interest. You can even click a link to search all of Facebook to find people outside of your friend graph who are interested in the same thing.

Another thing that Nexus can do is help you discover friends who are most similar to you. By clicking a provided link, the application compares your interests with those of your friends to determine who is most like you.

Not to worry, though - the information gathered is restricted to the permissions you have on Facebook. If you were to share a friend's page with someone who was not that person's friend, all they would be able to see is the graph itself, not the common interests and how they relate to others.

The graph generated by Nexus can be created as either a radial graph or a spring graph and can also be downloaded in one of three different sizes.

Why It's Useful

We can thank Alisa Rowan of the iCrossing blog for this find. She reminds us that Nexus isn't just fun, it can be helpful too, saying:

For those working in a space (social media) - where CPM, click-through rates, and other traditional digital metrics fail to provide a total picture of consumer interaction, involvement, and intimacy - you know that constantly seeking out new data, and new ways of looking at that data, are critical to understanding and quantifying the qualitative.

Agreed, but it's also a great way to waste hours on Facebook in a more productive fashion than ever before.

The Social Graph API uses the same algorithms at play in Google's search engine to discover how people are connected across the Internet. In fact, it only uses publicly available data -- if it's not on Google, the API won't be able to find it -- which Google says puts users in control of their own data since anything they don't like showing up, they can change at the source level.

The API works by searching for connections between people based on how people are linked on social networks and via publicly available profiles and pages -- i.e., if Marshall Kirkpatrick and I linked to each other on our personal blogs, or if we followed each other on Twitter, the Social Graph API might consider us friends because we have a strong connection. So, if I then sign up for a new social service, I can feed it links to my social presence elsewhere (like my blog or Twitter profile) and it will analyze those public connections and suggest to me that maybe I should be friends with Marshall on this new service because it looks like I'm friends with him elsewhere.

I spoke this morning to Google Developer Advocate Kevin Marks (whom we interviewed in December), and he showed me a demo using his blog as an example that shows how strong each of his various online presence points are connected. I.e., how his blog is connected to his Twitter account is connected to his Flickr page, etc.

As more and more users are beginning to suffer the effects of "social networking fatigue," anything that helps automate and make easier the process of adding your existing connections to a new network is a useful tool. The Social Graph API could be an important part of the data portability movement in that it allows users to find and evaluate their public social connections and take control of that information.

Google has set up a Social Graph API group as well as provided developer documentation.

Note that Berners-Lee wasn't specifically talking about the Social Graph, which is the term Facebook has been heavily promoting, but something more general. In a nutshell, this is how Berners-Lee envisions the 3 levels (a.k.a. layers of abstraction):

1. The Internet: links computers
2. Web: links documents
3. Graph: links relationships between people and/or documents -- "the things documents are about" as Berners-Lee put it.

The Graph is all about connections and re-use of data. Berners-Lee wrote that Semantic Web technologies will enable this:

"So, if only we could express these relationships, such as my social graph, in a way that is above the level of documents, then we would get re-use. That's just what the graph does for us. We have the technology -- it is Semantic Web technology, starting with RDF OWL and SPARQL. Not magic bullets, but the tools which allow us to break free of the document layer."

Sir Tim also notes that as we go up each level, we lose more control but gain more benefits: "...at each layer --- Net, Web, or Graph --- we have ceded some control for greater benefits." The benefits are what happens when documents and data are connected - for example being able to re-use our personal and friends data across multiple social networks, which is what Google's OpenSocial aims to achieve.

"Then, when I book a flight it is the flight that interests me. Not the flight page on the travel site, or the flight page on the airline site, but the URI (issued by the airlines) of the flight itself. That's what I will bookmark. And whichever device I use to look up the bookmark, phone or office wall, it will access a situation-appropriate view of an integration of everything I know about that flight from different sources. The task of booking and taking the flight will involve many interactions. And all throughout them, that task and the flight will be primary things in my awareness, the websites involved will be secondary things, and the network and the devices tertiary."

Conclusion

I'm very pleased Tim Berners-Lee has appropriated the concept of the Social Graph and married it to his own vision of the Semantic Web. What Berners-Lee wrote today goes way beyond Facebook, OpenSocial, or social networking in general. It is about how we interact with data on the Web (whether it be mobile or PC or a device like the Amazon Kindle) and the connections that we can take advantage of using the network. This is also why Semantic Apps are so interesting right now, as they take data connection to the next level on the Web.

Overall, unlike Nick Carr, I'm not concerned whether mainstream people accept the term 'Graph' or 'Social Graph'. It really doesn't matter, so long as the web apps that people use enable them to participate in this 'next level' of the Web. That's what Google, Facebook, and a lot of other companies are trying to achieve.

Incidentally, it's great to see Tim Berners-Lee 're-using' concepts like the Social Graph, or simply taking inspiration from them. He never really took to the Web 2.0 concept, perhaps because it became too hyped and commercialized, but the fact is that the Consumer Web has given us many innovations over the past few years. Everything from Google to YouTube to MySpace to Facebook. So even though Sir Tim has always been about graphs (as he noted in his post, the Graph is essentially the same as the Semantic Web), it's fantastic he is reaching out to the 'web 2.0' community and citing people like Brad Fitzpatrick and Alex Iskold.

Related: check out Alex Iskold's Social Graph: Concepts and Issues for an overview of the theory behind Social Graph. This is the post Tim Berners-Lee referenced. Also check out Alex's latest post today: R/WW Thanksgiving: Thank You Google for Open Social (Or, Why Open Social Really Matters).

The company is clearly full of great ideas that unfortunately get a maddeningly geeky explanation today on the Six Apart blog. There's an experimental product alluded to as well, but that's not being released right now.

The whole manifesto-lengthed blog post is worth a read, but he best part is the statement of the following principles.

• You should own your social graph
• Privacy must be done right by placing control in your hands
• It is good to be able to find out what is already public about you on the Internet
• Everyone has many social graphs, and they shouldn't always be connected
• Open technologies are the best way to solve these problems

That's really nice to read from a software vendor. I wish decision makers at Google said things like that. Someday the social graph and all of our Attention Data are going to be brought together and those are some great statements to serve as a policy foundation.

For now, though, we'll have to all get up on our bidirectional XFN links, FOAF and hCard so we can ride towards the glorious sunset of user-controlled data portability and a better experience online. To think that I just found the kickstand on my TCP/IP.

That said, it's a great start. For some more accessible background on the questions raised by Six Apart, micro-format and Identity savvy dude Chris Messina recommends checking out the social network portability discussion at microformats.org, Robert Gaal's Making OpenID Your Only Online Profile and The Future of Everything is Social: Consolidate and take back your social network at the blog Four Starters. Mark those puppies "to read" because this stuff is here to stay.]]> Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/six_apart_releases_statement_about_opening_the_social_graph.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/six_apart_releases_statement_about_opening_the_social_graph.php Thu, 20 Sep 2007 13:00:22 -0800 Marshall Kirkpatrick Yossy Mendolovich CEO of IMGuest, the world's only hotel management social network, has launched a service that flips the script on how marketing people interact with guests at prominent chains.

IMGuest is a premium marketing tool launched three days ago that enables marketing and guest relations staff to use the social graph to interact with hotel guests at check-in. From that moment on, staff can push out discounts and other offers to them instantaneously based on their interests.

The data reflect the interests, histories and demographics that marketing staff can leverage to make the physical experience at the hotel more gratifying. Instead of having guests search out their own next actions, the actions are delivered to them as cues in emails.

Mendolovich says the Tel Aviv-based company started by running a pilot with eight international hotels that he could not mention because of confidentiality agreements. The hotels are global.

We got a sneak peek into how this social graph for hotel managers works.

Essentially, hotel staff log into IMGuest through the portal and then monitor guests who check-in to the social graph. The interface shows all their profiles, and then you can dig down deeper to get metadata about those individuals.

Staff can post to the guests marketing offers for things like a jazz night, a flash sale on free drinks, or a spa discount, throughout the chain or specifically to guests at the particular hotel, and it will go directly to the people who are logged in as guests at that moment. Staff can filter through demographic data like age, gender, origin, or interests.

This premium account is available only to hotels and the price is about $50 per hotel, per month. There is a free version available to anyone.

We're seeing more and more products that utilize the social graph, and so Marks' explanation is a useful primer on the concepts behind them.

Video from LIFT

Related: ReadWriteTalk interview with Kevin Marks, Dec 07; and Alex Iskold's analysis of Why Open Social Really Matters.

What this Means for Advertisers

Advertisers will have access to Facebook's Open Graph, meaning that advertisements will be far more targeted. If a user says they love basketball, a sporting goods store could target ads to that user. Currently advertisers can only target users based on the Pages they Like - and we all know that the act of clicking "Like" doesn't mean very much at all.

Plus, shopping is inherently social, said Facebook's Director of Platform and Mobile Marketing Katie Mitic:

"Integrating Facebook Open Graph technology across EBay's global commerce platforms represents a powerful way to bring people together across an inherently social activity - shopping."

But just because an activity is inherently social, it doesn't mean that people want to do it together online. Or does it?

Facebook's Previous Social Failures

This is not the first time Facebook has jumped into the commerce space. Just last year, Delta Airlines launched a Facebook "ticket window," which many thought would be the future of e-commerce. Instead, people continued buying tickets from the airline's website, or through deal-finding services like Kayak.com. This proved to be a non-social activity - or, at least, Facebook hasn't found a way to make it social online. When it came to social search, Bing tried highlighting pages that user's Facebook friends "liked." This feature did not take off. Facebook's attempt at challenging Groupon through social deals closed after four months later, and Facebook's Time Warner Facebook app for movie streaming also went down as a failed social activity.

Will EBay's Facebook Presence Change the Social Commerce Game?

Facebook has a history of conflating the social graph with the interest graph, and the new EBay integration might fall prey to that very problem.

The social graph charts "who I know" while the interest graph shows "what I like," and the two don't necessarily mix. For example, what if you're a die-hard Jean-Luc Godard film fan but your closest friends dislike French film? Or what if you have a friend that loves baking bread at home while you prefer dining out at gluten-free restaurants? You won't necessarily start disliking Jean-Luc Godard films and loving bread just because that's how your friends feel.

The social graph and the interest graph may overlap completely in a few key friendships with a best friend, or someone who you jokingly claim you "share the same mindscape" with. These are the relationships that Facebook is really looking for. The question is, will there be enough data available for the behemoth social network to actually find them? Or will it lean heavily on recommendations being shared between friends on social networks?

Once you open your Google Profile, you might start seeing some suggested links at the bottom of the page (as usual, it seems Google is rolling this out slowly) and, as far as we can see, these links are pulled from your Social Graph. If you don't see anything there, you can help your profile along by, for example, adding a link to your FriendFeed account at the bottom of the page. After you do that, Google will suggest adding the feeds you import into FriendFeed to your profile and, from there, it draw even more conclusions about your online habits.

hCard

Also, as Chris Messina points out in this video, the profiles now also support the hCard microformat, which makes importing them into other products a lot easier.

Privacy

When Google first announced the Social Graph API, we had some concerns about the privacy implications of this. After all, nobody on the net knows more about your behaviors than Google. For now, Google seems to be moving slowly and by just rolling out suggested pages for your profile, it doesn't startle users with too much information.

The Grand Google Profile?

Google, so far, never really pushed the profile. Right now, it is only exposed in Google Maps. However, if Google starts pushing it a bit more, especially now that it is linked to you social graph, it could potentially start marketing the profile as 'the' central repository for your online identity.

Google is already a member of the DataPortability workgroup, which also advocates the use of microformats like hCard and XFN. These additions to the Google Profile could suggest that Google does indeed have greater plans for it has let us to believe so far.

If you are not quite clear about how the Social Graph API works, here is a short video of a Google engineer explaining how it works:

Several years ago, Google began encountering these sorts of problems with relational data, particularly as this graph data didn't really fit into its Map Reduce system for big data processing. So Google developed a product called Pregel, which solved the relational data problem and allowed it to be processed on a massive scale.

While Pregel remains an in-house technology for Google, the data startup Ravel is releasing its Pregel-like, large-scale graph processing technology today.

But most importantly, says Zach Richardson, the lead architect of the GoldenOrb project and the CTO of Ravel, it makes the programming that developers have to do far simpler. Rather than worrying about how they can get it to run about thousands of machines, "they can just focus on the algorithm for solving their particular problem." According to Richardson, this means that large scale data problems are now solvable even by startups.

Richardson says that Ravel opted to open source the technology so that others could work on writing algorithms and solve various problems that, in turn, Ravel hopes to be able to learn from as well. The company has no immediate plans to offer commercial support around GoldenOrb.

First up is this graph that plots the number of friends each user has against the "cumulative average distribution" on the Y-axis. This latter measurement shows the percentage of users who have less than the given number of friends. So you can see that 10% of the total Facebook population have less than 10 friends, and 50% have less than 100 friends. So much for friending envy. The distribution shows that the average friend count is 190 people. My personal goal has always been to have more friends than my 20-something daughter, but that probably is unattainable. Still, I guess I shouldn't feel so bad that I am in the 90-something percentile, at least according to this analysis.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the distribution of the ages of your friends closely matches your own age. The red line in the graph below shows what the age distribution of your friends would be if were to follow a more random pattern.

The researchers used a 24-core CPU with 72 GB of RAM for one study and a 2,250-node Hadoop cluster for the other. Hadoop had its origins at Yahoo and is used extensively at Facebook, so that was quite appropriate. The post on Facebook Data's site goes into more detail, and has links to the two academic papers, which go into much more detail. If that is too much to ponder, then consider the following graph:

I put together my own analysis using an Excel spreadsheet and fake data to come up with the pie chart. Here I posit that the types of lists of friends that I have already created for my own account are typical of the many millions of Facebook users. You tell me what you think.

Taylor said that Facebook believes that users will discover apps through their graphs and sharing, which fits well into what was announced this morning at the keynote. Does it mean that Facebook is not going to go after Apple and Android native applications with a Web-based store? Not necessarily. Facebook today took the first steps that will bring its platforms games to every browser that can access the Internet.

To a certain extent, this is more of the same in terms of what Facebook has done with its mobile roadmap. Timeline is built to work with the browser and any device that has a browser capable of handling Facebook (from tablets and smartphones to PCs) will be able to run Timeline-based applications.

In terms of the open graph, Facebook is building upon its previous announcements and the open graph API.

Post f8 keynote press conference with Facebook executives including CEO Mark Zuckerberg, CTO Bret Taylor and head of products Chris Cox.

"We are basically taking the same brand (the open graph API) and expanding the scope of what it is capable of," Taylor said.

Taylor said that Facebook is planning on educating users on how the new Timeline and open graph apps are supposed to work. Zuckerberg himself acknowledged that the Timeline and the open graph apps are "one of the biggest changes that we have made in years.

Even though there is no "central repository" coming for Facebook apps, that does not mean that the so-called "Project Spartan" that was ostensibly supposed to be an HTML5-based Web app store, is not in the works. Taylor said that even though it is not in the works right now, Facebook holds the option to do so in the future.

Later in the day at f8 there are multiple sessions on how Facebook is rolling out mobile and social development as well as what the company is working on in terms of HTML5 development. We will hit those sessions and update exactly how Facebook envisions its mobile future and HTML5 development later in the day.

Open Graph apps are the final installment of what Facebook announced at its f8 Developers' Conference in San Francisco last September. Open Graph apps are the coup de grace to Timeline. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said at the time, "We think that people are going to want to share all kinds of things with their lives and we think that apps are the way they want to show them."

Facebook's original vision for Timeline was to be an annotated digital scrapbook. Think about what you put in a scrapbook. Pictures of you and your friends, meals you've shared, sites you have seen, people you have met. Maybe even album covers from a band you like or news articles you may have read, written or been mentioned in. When people come to your house, you show them the scrapbook and say, "oh, remember when we went to Niagra Falls, here are the pictures."

This is where the verbs kick in. Facebook started the notion of social verbs with the ability "to like" something. An article, piece of music, TV show etc. Anybody that has spent time on Facebook since the announcement of the Open Graph has seen the first apps in action such as articles from the Washington Post or what people are listening to on Spotify. All of those actions get transposed to your Timeline.

Facebook believes that the best way to discover apps is through social connections. Hence, there is no app store in Facebook. The Open Graph is designed for people to share life events and the applications used to create them along the social pipes of the Facebook ecosystem.

"Open graph is really the biggest opportunity to create new apps since we started apps on Facebook," Facebook CTO Bret Taylor said at f8.

Image: Facebook's top executives talk the Timeline and Open Graph at f8 in San Francisco, Sept. 2011.

The Real Start Of Frictionless Sharing

The Open Graph also revolves around the notion of "frictionless sharing." That would be sharing your actions (the aforementioned verbs) without explicitly going into the social platform and saying "I ran three miles today." The Open Graph mixed with an app like Nike+ (or maybe RunKeeper and its kindred) will have the ability to automatically update to Facebook.

We have weighed in on frictionless sharing multiples times since its announcement in September. Our founder, Richard MacManus, looked at the pros and cons of frictionless sharing while senior writer Marshall Kirkpatrick penned an editorial on "Why Facebook's Seamless Sharing Is Wrong."

There are certainly privacy issues to be addressed. Will Facebook make it certain that apps published to the Open Graph have clear, direct and simple directions for how and what you share? Left to their own devices, many app publishers will obfuscate the data privacy parameters of their apps. The directive for privacy on the Open Graph needs to come from the top, from Facebook itself.

Image: IHeartRadio being shown as an example of Facebook's Open Graph at f8.

Not everyone wants to share their scrapbooks. Facebook is more than just what it has made with Timeline. It is a compendium of news, conversations, games, sharing and communication. Facebook should realize that it is different things to different people. Will some people be extremely excited about the ability to use Open Graph apps to share the big and small events of their lives? Sure. Some people will not care though, preferring to use the platform as a way of discussing events with friends without those discussions being chronicled to the Timeline.

The company has scheduled a press event for tomorrow, Wednesday, Jan. 18. The assumption is that Facebook will announce the Open Graph is now out of beta and ready for developers and users to build upon.

Are you ready for the Open Graph? How will you use it? Let us know in the comments.

Facebook seems to be testing a new feature that could give it more granular data of people's profiles and strengthen bonds within its social graph. Facebook has started showing users a "needs review" notification for information that others add in your profile. For instance, say you want to add a colleague from a past or current job, the person gets a notification that says that there is information that you need to review.

In terms of employment, this brings Facebook much closer to LinkedIn's style of strengthening connections along its social graph. LinkedIn makes it very clear that you must have a connection with the other person and the connection must be approved by both people before the link is completed. In this way, Facebook can make stronger ties in the vast web of its social graph.

How To Use The New Facebook Lists (And Why You Should)

Facebook's Subscribe Button & Public Social Networking

Facebook Releases Smart Friend Lists to Counter Google+ Circles

Does Facebook's Subscribe Button Betray What the Company Was Built On?

Prompting Users To Strengthen Ties

What Facebook really wants to do is hone in on the most granular connections it can make amongst its users. Think of it as a wheel with spokes. A particular user is the center of the wheel. The spokes coming off the center are the strongest connections that person has in their social graph. That could be a significant other, work connections, family, close friends you associate with frequently etc.

Facebook can then work off this map they have created of your life. Ostensibly, this would be for the means of advertising and targeting. For instance, if Facebook knows where you work and the people that work there with you, it can more efficiently target ads or services (like games or apps) that are likely to be of interest. For instance, Richard and I work for ReadWriteWeb (well, I work for Richard at ReadWriteWeb). Facebook knows that RWW is in its tech/media categories. Ad buyers looking at Facebook's platform could theoretically buy a block of advertising that is targeted at people who specifically work in tech media. The stronger the ties that Facebook makes in users' social graphs, the more of a premium it can put on targeted advertising. Or push users to a particular service that is beneficial to Facebook such as generating more data or purchasing a product.

Consolidating The Social Graph

Under Facebook's older versions of its social graph, this particular data was not readily aggregated. Yet, by getting one person to confirm the connection, the work on Facebook's side is eased tremendously. The users are strengthening the connections themselves as opposed to Facebook having to extrapolate from their own data that two people may be connected in one fashion or another.

Where LinkedIn works so well is that it is in the particular market of employment. It can hone its data in on certain professions or verticals through information the users provide themselves. This is a step by Facebook in that direction.

This is all a function of the new subscribe button and smart lists features. What happened in this particular instance is that I added Richard to my ReadWriteWeb smart list that Facebook automatically generated for me. Under the hood, Facebook must have extrapolated that both Richard and I list RWW under our employment. It then automatically sent a message to Richard to confirm what its own data was telling it.

Facebook's power is its wealth of data within the social graph. In recent weeks we have seen Facebook begin to consolidate that power by adding context to much of its data. It is doing this automatically on its side by making connections between users (smart lists) and now it is having users themselves create the strong connections ("needs review" and the subscribe button).

Have you seen the "needs review" notification pop up in your Facebook profile yet? Is the strengthening of ties in your social graph beneficial to you as a user? Or has Facebook become too clever for its own good?

This tool is called FBFriendFinder. It comes from the Dutch web dev shop Open & Sociaal, and it works like a charm by using OAuth, Facebook Connect and contact export functions to gather enough data to organize a user's social graph. The most interesting part, however, isn't the technology but the business model. You have to read it to believe it.

FBFriendFinder has take the much maligned approach of actually requiring users to pay for the service. Users are charged around one American penny per friend found, give or take. The site integrates with PayPal, so the process is quick and painless.

After we paid our fee, we were able to scroll through a slideshow of our social graph (albeit with a lot of same-name duplicate accounts) to find and add those friends to our Facebook network. This process was a tiny bit buggy and required some back-and-forth navigation (it seems our friends at The Next Web had the same problem), but overall, the experience was well worth the five bucks it took to find these friends without having to manually hunt them down ourselves or rely on Facebook suggestions.

Also, we appreciate the app's acknowledgement of our "crazy lifestyle." And now, we're off to ditch these pajama pants we've been sporting since the weekend and just go bananas. It's our crazy lifestyle calling to us - the crazy lifestyle we never knew we had.

A sincere congratulations to the FBFriendFinder dude for creating a handy and monetizable application.