Continuing our theme of social networking, I spoke recently with Jof Arnold of UK start up BrainBakery, just after BrainBakery had been Scobleized - Robert Scoble had posted his top ten Facebook applications, and BrainBakery’s latest development project, Blog Friends for Luke Razzell’s i-together.com, had made number 7 in the chart.
Jof started BrainBakery last year to develop a music-based social network similar to Weedshare.com. After shelving the project, he and his business partner Benjie Gillam, along with Gavin Bramhill and Rob Cambridge, formed their development agency to specialize in web applications - including their own content management system, blogs, forums and a series of social networking tools which they eventually intend to build in to a product set that can be white labelled.
Jof has been a regular at the London OpenCoffee Club, hooking up with other start ups and software companies, and it was there he met Luke Razzell. After impressing Luke by developing a Facebook blog reader and a “Twitter-like” SMS application in “a few lunchtimes”, they landed the job to build Blog Friends - an app that filters your RSS feeds based on your social network and your likes and dislikes. Through the success of Blog Friends - it’s currently the 40th fastest-growing on Facebook - they’ve generated a pipeline of business and follow-on projects, and now focus most of their attention on the Facebook platform.
I asked Jof what he thought of the Facebook platform as a developer and he said:
“The few minuses (namely no CSS, no Javascript, occasional API bugs, limiting FBML…) pale when compared to the opportunities it offers; it gives developers access to a goldmine of unique and interesting data on which they can develop new and exciting businesses quickly and easily.”
BrainBakery have made an excellent choice in building up their expertise in this area, covering social networking tools in general as well as Facebook in particular. I wish them well for the future, and expect them to be announcing some more projects soon.
Company Index: BrainBakery
August 14th, 2007 at 1:28 pm
Wow… look how out of date this looks in just a couple of days!
For those readers who don’t know, Facebook now have a beta for “FBJS” - JavaScript on Facebook no less! Woohoo!
http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/FBJS