For the (entire world’s population – my direct family) who don’t know about GIVM.com, it is a very cool (IMHO), Web 1.0-ish shared gift list manager. It was born out of the frustration of trying to coordinate xmas and birthday gift giving amongst family members, especially as the family(ies) grew from people such as myself getting married.

So, the GiftList was born, originally running at bratton.com/giftlist, and it has been running for six years now, with about zero problems. It’s also been running with about zero growth. *sigh* Granted, I haven’t really tried to market it at all, because of the hope that it would virally take off.

The big problem is that the viral analogy doesn’t work for gift giving, because most gift circles are just that – circles. They have very few branch points to virally spread the word. Okay, yes, in a perfect world, somehow overlapping families would spread the word, but it hasn’t happened much at all.

One of the most amazing things about GIVM is that I managed to snag givm.com a while back. Crazy! I love the name, and when I saw it as available, I was in shock for a while before I bought it.

So, last month I heard about Facebook opening up their “platform” API thingamdooey, and I spent a few long nights porting GIVM to run inside of Facebook. One big bonus was that I back-ported some of the CSS to givm.com, so now whether you use givm.com or the GiftList app inside of Facebook, they both look pretty good.

Overall the dev experience was fairly straightforward, but I lucked out a lot that my schema design matched up very cleanly with Facebook’s. And I rock, of course.

After a week or so of anxious waiting to be approved into the Application Directory, I was in! There are a few other gift list type apps available on Facebook, but none of them have the same usability that mine has. I’ve had six freakin’ years to make sure that grandmas and grandpas can use this thing! I know where most gifts come from, baby, and you’ve got to play to your audience.

Facebook? Grandparents? Hm, not quite a match-up there yet. And that of course is the cart before the horse problem I’ve got, which is that Facebook is supposed to grow from 20ish million users to 50ish million users by the end of the year. Okay, a lot of those will be older people, not just the current FB highschoolers and college folk, but it probably will be a slow growth curve for the gray set. Which means my GiftList is probably not going to explode with high user numbers on Facebook.

After 3 weeks, I’m up to about 430 users. Lots more than givm.com, but dust in the wind compared to silly trifles like X-Me…

Today is the last day, well, last morning, of the big ACM conference at my old stomping grounds, UIUC. I’m very surprised it wasn’t overrun with people from Chicago, like myself, who are fans of Joel Spolsky and Robert Cringely, not to mention groupies that want to fawn over some of the lucky winners/founders of some big dot-com and/or media success stories, such as PayPal, YouTube, and Red vs Blue.

But, apparently people in Chicago read the rest of the program list aside from Joel and Max and Cringely, and realized that the other sessions are very academic researchy, and not so interesting. At least, they weren’t for me.

So, what to do in the old stomping grounds with the extra time? Geeking out programming, of course, as well as hitting the best pizza places in CU. Garcia’s, Papa Del’s, and the hidden gem The Jolly Roger. Mm mm mm. Good stuff.

So what useful did come out of the speakers so far? Joel and Max were very inspirational, although with quite different takes on things. Joel is a smart guy and believes in some planning. Max is all about ignoring the business side of things _completely_ and just programming away for 7.5 days solid (his number) until you’ve got a web site that you can show to friends and they can tell you it sucks. Okay, rapid prototyping, I can buy that.

Joel talked about why some gadgets win and some gadgets lose, whether hardware or software, and attributed it to a magic combination of Making Users Happy, Think About Emotions, and Obsess Over Aesthetics. I won’t repeat his talk here, as some people already have heard it at other venues, apparently.

What’s interesting, and a serious oversight, is that both Max and Joel completely ignored marketing and how people will actually find out about your product. Joel ignored it because he was comparing things like iPods and Zens, which are from huge companies and so it is assumed they have a huge marketing budget. Max ignored the marketing side except for a short “use viral marketing” comment, which is a nice theory, but takes approximately a year for anything to happen.

Am I inspired? Yes. Anything earth shattering? Somewhat. I really need to spend more time making my six-year hobby project emotionally satisfying, as well as making it actually work. More on that later…