We are a small team who’s among the leading applications provider on social networks. Jambool was founded by Amazon.com veterans: Vikas Gupta & Reza Hussein. During their tenure there, they built, led and directed game changing effects in the payments, order processing and web services areas.
We understand scale and it’s good that we do — in a short time span we’ve built products that have reached millions of users and our servers serve millions of requests every single day. Join us as we expand our products and lead the Social applications space.
You are a super software engineer who knows how to build things that scale well. You can pick up new paradigms and programming languages, you have the knack of knowing the right thing to build for long term, and do it without losing sight of the short term needs. You can code and code really, really well. You understand the web technologies, and you understand databases. You are familiar with messaging and distributed systems, and can write and debug multi threaded programs. You enjoy working with smart folks, and get motivated by delivering useful products to users.
You should be able to code in at least two of the following languages: C, Ruby, C++, Java, Perl.
Facebook’s latest changes for request and notifications allocations go live soon. From what we have seen, applications will have an allocation of requests ranging from 0 to 24 — based on our estimates from “buckets” we’ve seen allocated for our applications. In most cases it will remain below 15.
I was attending a panel a few days ago that included folks from Bebo, Myspace, Facebook and Hi5. Interestingly, all the other platforms are taking cues from Facebook and only opening their platforms with limited virality. Their theory is to go slow and easy — and open up more as they learn about it. I personally think their caution is going to be their failure. Yes, apps might make your platform more spammy for users, but if you really want to attract the developers, you have to show the value immediately. Developers are not going to stick around for a promise or hope of it becoming better in months. That said, the developers with an already existing user base on Facebook will probably do better — as they will be able to stick it out for longer.
Max Levchin wrote a great article on the aspects of a developer platform that make it work.
We are excited about the Myspace platform in particular, and it will be interesting to watch their launch over the next few weeks.
When we get time, we will keep adding to this list, but here is a start.
Among all the things we find extremely useful, the ones we couldn’t do without are:
Quickbooks — it makes payroll, accounting, taxes just so much easier. The 2008 edition on Mac wasn’t available when we got ours, and payroll in any case is only on Windows. That’s probably the only downside I could think of.
Skype — Reza and I use it to talk all the time, and it is by far the best video chat for 2 people. Its performance and abilities downgrade quickly once you add more people, its quality is sometimes less than ideal and its desktop software crashes occasionally (on Mac 10.4). Aside from that, it has been quite flawless.
Online events and conference listing websites. We’ve used Facebook Events, Upcoming, Meetup — and each of them have their pros and cons. Facebook Events works best if there is an event listing over there because we anyway spend time on Facebook, and it is easy to track upcoming events on the Facebook home page. Upcoming is harder to integrate with calendars — it kept breaking for me. Meetup is ok — but its interface is clumsy and of late I’ve hardly seen an event listed on meetup that I want to go to and is not already on Facebook.
We had an opportunity to present at the Facebook and Opensocial developer meetup at the Google offices on Feb 13. Here’s the video and the slides. You can find more coverage on the meetup here.
Hello from our spanking new blog site. For a while we have been thinking about moving it to the jambool.com domain, but other things have just gotten in the way. No more.
More to come later, but in the meanwhile,do update your blog reader settings to get this blog instead of the old one (at jambool.blogspot.com).
