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SAN FRANCISCO, CA - November 11, 2008 - Global social media network Bebo (www.bebo.com), today announced that it has launched new engagement metrics and tools for application developers. At an event held in Mountain View, Calif., Bebo demoed new metrics and engagement tools to nearly 100 Java, PHP, and Rails developers who have created applications - from music and movies to gameplay and photo sharing - for the site's 45 million users worldwide. Bebo has also announced JavaScript support in Beta for platform developers.
Bebo's industry-first developer tools include new, valuable engagement metrics and reporting that analyze time spent, percentage of returning users, and time spent/total installs of applications. Bebo will use a portion of this newly available information to compute an Engagement Metric for developers, based on both percentage of returning users and time spent in an application. All applications will be given a dynamic 1-10 ranking, and those that consistently hold the highest ranking will be rewarded with increased access to viral channels and visibility, opportunity to test Beta features. The first reward will be the ability to send changes feed items to non-app users.
To underscore its commitment to engaging applications, Bebo also announced today the B.E.S.T 'Bebo's Engage to Succeed Today' Developer Challenge for new applications, with co-sponsor Sun Startup Essentials. Judges for Bebo's B.E.S.T. contest are bloggers Dave McClure of 500Hats, Frank Gruber of SomewhatFrank.com, and Jesse Stay of StayNAlive. The contest is open to all new applications uploaded to Bebo beginning today. Winners will be announced at a future Bebo developer event in early 2009, and will win prizes from Sun Microsystems and on-site promotion on Bebo.
'Bebo's Open Application Platform has allowed developers of all sizes to build engaging applications for Bebo's international user base since its launch nearly one year ago,' said Jessica Alter, Director of Business Development and Platform for Bebo. "At Bebo, we pride ourselves on having an extremely active and engaged community. Now with the addition of new engagement metrics and tools, we are providing developers with better information and a tangible measure of engagement so that they can increase the performance of their apps, and maximize revenues. This adds great value to the overall platform, and really gives developers the tools they need to build applications that users will want to come back to."
Today, developers joined Bebo engineers to hear firsthand how Bebo's application platform was built, and learned about 'Platform Migration' from Blake Commagere of Ohai, deployment on OpenSolaris from Marina Fisher from the Sun Startup Essentials Team, and demos from five other application developers.
Sun Startup Essentials is offering free web hosting for Bebo developers for one year on Joyent's cloud computing environment. To sign up and get free access the developers can go to http://www.joyent.com/developers/bebo. With this offer, developers can leverage the feature set of OpenSolaris to develop, debug and deploy Bebo social applications and scale from zero to millions of pages views.
"Sun Microsystems is a strong supporter of the developer communities and initiatives that encourage innovation through the use of open source applications and platforms," said Sanjay Sharma, Director of Startups and Emerging Markets at Sun Microsystems. "We are excited to co-sponsor the B.E.S.T contest and to collaborate with Bebo and Joyent to provide Bebo developers access to Sun's OpenSolaris platform and expertise in building large scale applications."
Launched in December 2007, Bebo's Open Application Platform allows third party developers to integrate their applications directly with the Bebo site. Bebo's platform has nearly 14,000 applications encompassing gaming, communications, virtual worlds, music and entertainment.
BEBO ANNOUNCES NEW ENGAGEMENT TOOLS AND METRICS FOR DEVELOPERS
November 11, 2008
Global social media network rewards developers with new engagement metrics and launches B.E.S.T 'Bebo's Engage to Succeed Today' contest, co-sponsored by the Sun Startup Essentials programSAN FRANCISCO, CA - November 11, 2008 - Global social media network Bebo (www.bebo.com), today announced that it has launched new engagement metrics and tools for application developers. At an event held in Mountain View, Calif., Bebo demoed new metrics and engagement tools to nearly 100 Java, PHP, and Rails developers who have created applications - from music and movies to gameplay and photo sharing - for the site's 45 million users worldwide. Bebo has also announced JavaScript support in Beta for platform developers.
Bebo's industry-first developer tools include new, valuable engagement metrics and reporting that analyze time spent, percentage of returning users, and time spent/total installs of applications. Bebo will use a portion of this newly available information to compute an Engagement Metric for developers, based on both percentage of returning users and time spent in an application. All applications will be given a dynamic 1-10 ranking, and those that consistently hold the highest ranking will be rewarded with increased access to viral channels and visibility, opportunity to test Beta features. The first reward will be the ability to send changes feed items to non-app users.
To underscore its commitment to engaging applications, Bebo also announced today the B.E.S.T 'Bebo's Engage to Succeed Today' Developer Challenge for new applications, with co-sponsor Sun Startup Essentials. Judges for Bebo's B.E.S.T. contest are bloggers Dave McClure of 500Hats, Frank Gruber of SomewhatFrank.com, and Jesse Stay of StayNAlive. The contest is open to all new applications uploaded to Bebo beginning today. Winners will be announced at a future Bebo developer event in early 2009, and will win prizes from Sun Microsystems and on-site promotion on Bebo.
'Bebo's Open Application Platform has allowed developers of all sizes to build engaging applications for Bebo's international user base since its launch nearly one year ago,' said Jessica Alter, Director of Business Development and Platform for Bebo. "At Bebo, we pride ourselves on having an extremely active and engaged community. Now with the addition of new engagement metrics and tools, we are providing developers with better information and a tangible measure of engagement so that they can increase the performance of their apps, and maximize revenues. This adds great value to the overall platform, and really gives developers the tools they need to build applications that users will want to come back to."
Today, developers joined Bebo engineers to hear firsthand how Bebo's application platform was built, and learned about 'Platform Migration' from Blake Commagere of Ohai, deployment on OpenSolaris from Marina Fisher from the Sun Startup Essentials Team, and demos from five other application developers.
Sun Startup Essentials is offering free web hosting for Bebo developers for one year on Joyent's cloud computing environment. To sign up and get free access the developers can go to http://www.joyent.com/developers/bebo. With this offer, developers can leverage the feature set of OpenSolaris to develop, debug and deploy Bebo social applications and scale from zero to millions of pages views.
"Sun Microsystems is a strong supporter of the developer communities and initiatives that encourage innovation through the use of open source applications and platforms," said Sanjay Sharma, Director of Startups and Emerging Markets at Sun Microsystems. "We are excited to co-sponsor the B.E.S.T contest and to collaborate with Bebo and Joyent to provide Bebo developers access to Sun's OpenSolaris platform and expertise in building large scale applications."
Launched in December 2007, Bebo's Open Application Platform allows third party developers to integrate their applications directly with the Bebo site. Bebo's platform has nearly 14,000 applications encompassing gaming, communications, virtual worlds, music and entertainment.
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