SNAP Facebook Conference 10/26/07

Last Friday, October 26, 2007, five of us from World Vital Records went to the Facebook conference in San Francisco. Our CEO, Paul Allen, is emphatic about each of us going to conferences and trade shows to make sure that we have access to the latest information and best practices in our respective areas of responsibility. So even though we are all swamped with our day to day responsibilities and dealing with the rapid growth of our user base, we stopped what we were doing and went to San Francisco for the day.

The immediate detail that jumped out to me about the conference is the real-time exchange of information with everyone else that is dealing with the same issues that we are. Speakers would say things like "earlier this week we tried this, and it didn't work so we tried this and it did." In the rapidly changing technology world real time sharing of information is powerful and valuable.

I know that Paul has expressed his frustrations about the Provo Labs Academy and how he wasn't able to accomplish what he wanted to with that project. However, those who participated benefited greatly. Listening to the experts that are working in the trenches to solve the same problems that we are is worth many times the price of admission. I know that I learned a lot from the Provo Labs Academy lectures and hardly a day goes by that I don't use something that I learned in those classes.

The key focuses of the SNAP sponsored Facebook conference that appealed to me were scalability and monetization of Facebook apps. Both are issues that we are working on at World Vital Records. Scalability is critical so that we can still rapidly expand our user base to meet the demand while maintaining a positive user experience. There were several references to Amazon's EC2 and S3. The main downside to those services is the lack of load balancing in their server clouds. I expect Amazon to address those issues in the future.

Monetization is critical in that now that we have huge installed user bases, we need to generate the revenue to take care of those users and installed systems. We will begin our monetization plans later this week based on what we learned at the conference.

We think that our We're Related app on Facebook will be the first of the 2nd generation apps on Facebook. Most of the 1st generation apps were 'internet toys.' But now serious apps like ours are giving people real reasons to benefit their lives by using practical and real world applications.

We have adopted the industry term 'Social Graph.' We have used other terms to describe that, but it makes sense for us to use the common terminology.

One other thing that stood out to me is one of the strategies to virality. The viral triggers need to be initiated during the first 20 clicks that a person does on your app, or it won't happen. Now that I have learned that I have noticed that feature on a half dozen sites. I wouldn't have recognize that without that concept that was discused at the conference.

Lastly, while this was Facebook specific confernce, over 85% of the things that were discused apply outside the Facebook arena. I plan to implement things that I learned on our We're Related Facebook app, WorldVitalRecords.com, FamilyLink.com, and even my personal web sites.

Chief Justice John Roberts speaks at BYU

One of the advantages of working next to the BYU campus is that I can occasionally attend the forums and devotionals that they hold every week. I enjoyed attending them while I was a student at BYU.

One of the most memorable devotionals was when President Benson spoke to a completely packed Marriot Center crowd.

Chief Justice John Roberts of the Supreme Court spoke to a large BYU crowd on Tuesday, October 23rd. The crowd was about 3 times larger than the crowed that listened to Senator Harry Reid, the Senate Majority Leader, who spoke two weeks before.

Judge Roberts started with a joke about why he doesn't tell 'lawyer jokes' any more. The lawyers don't think the jokes are funny, and no one else thinks they are jokes.

Judge Roberts proceeded to give an exceptional dissertation on the United States Constitution.

He pointed that out that France has had 10 constitutions in the same time that we have had our original. He joked that French bookstores don't sell their constitutions because they don't carry periodicals.

The US Constitution is a bill of rights that sets us apart from other nations in that it sets up rights by its creators: 'we the people.'

He said that our constitution has been put down by critics because it it 'all sail and no anchor.'

Our constitution sets up the balance of powers with the legislative, executive, and judicial and separate and equally powerful branches of government. Roberts stated that the founders of the constitution intentionally made it difficult to make laws. They made it even more difficult to amend the constitution. Laws could be created but it required a lot of support. Amending the constitution required a 2/3 majority of both houses and a ¾ of all state legislatures to ratify.

Roberts described difference between the US government and Great Britain's. The government in the UK is not divided. The Parliament elects the Prime Minister and the equivalent of the supreme court from among themselves. He said that they have recently made progress in dividing the governmental powers. This was the very reason that we fought to leave them and now, over 200 years later, they are following our leave.

The framers of the constitution recognized the need to have a powerful executive to counter balance the congress and the senate. He said he thought that they made the president more powerful than they needed to because they new that the first president would be Washington. They had just separated themselves from the King and yet the set up a very powerful president as the executive officer.

He pointed out that the 1st building to be build in Washington DC was the White House. The 2nd was the US Capital. However, the Supreme Court didn't get a building until 1944.

The grand words in the constitutions of other countries are just empty promises unless the courts are powerful enough to uphold the rights guaranteed to the citizens. The constitution of the old Soviet Union had a lot of beautiful and flowery words, but they failed to create a court system to guarantee individual rights. Brutal dictators did not fear their constitution, nor their courts.

Judge Roberts reiterated that Judges must not abuse their independence to write law into their decisions. They must interpret the law set by the legislative branch, not take that power unto themselves.

Judges must show the lonely courage of a patriot in their decisions.

Our country only has 1 Supreme Court unlike other countries that have have multiple overlapping supreme courts of their countries. You can imagine the confusion and court shopping that this creates.

There have been 11,000 proposed amendments to the US Constitution, yet only 27 have been ratified.

Judge Roberts praised former BYU president and Supreme Court Solicitor General Rex Lee. He described arguing a case before the Supreme Court and against Rex Lee. Roberts went on to lose in a 9-0 decision in Lee's favor. Roberts' client asked him why the lost 9-0, and Roberts responded because there were only 9 justices.

Chief Justice Roberts went on to praise Rex Lee as a modern example of the founders of the constitution. It made me wonder if President Lee had not died of cancer, if he would not be on the Supreme Court now.

Another great success story from WorldVitalRecords.com

We love to keep track of the many success stories that our customs have when working with the ever-growing collection of databases on WorldVitalRecords.com.

There are 2 that I repeat to others when they ask about how things are going at WorldVitalRecords.com.

The first of many examples that I use happened at the FGS conference in Ft. Wayne Indiana this past August. A nice lady from one of the large state genealogy societies came by the World Vital Records booth. She said that she has a rate name in her family that she uses to see how complete a genealogy site's databases are. The rare name that she uses for this test is "Frink." She said that in most other genealogy database sites, she finds very little useful information about the Frink family.

I typed then surname "Frink" into our global search and even I was amazed by the search result. The top search result in the Family Histories was a small database that is part of the Quintin collection entitled "Records From the Bible of Eliza Gold Frink, Brunswick County, North Carolina." This small database contained 18 pages from the 1832 family bible of Eliza Frink. These pages contained the pedigree charts and family name lists for 8 generations of the Frink family! She had never heard of Eliza Frink, but she immediately recognized some of the names on those pages from the Frink Family Bible. This was a gold mine of family history research for her.

The next example of an amazing success on WorldVitalRecords.com happened just this week. We had a prospective business partner from Seattle that came to Provo to visit with us. She was not that familiar with our site or with genealogy database sites in general. I explained what we did and how our business model worked. I wanted to give her an example of some of the databases that we had on our site. I asked her where her family was from. I navigated to the state of Washington to see all of the data that we had for Washington state. I scrolled down through the roughly 50 databases that we have that pertain to Washington state. About halfway down the list, she saw the Deer Park Tribune and the Deer Park Union newspapers. These are part of the SmallTownPapers® collection that we have on WorldVitalRecords.com.

She exclaimed, "that is where I am from." She then began to browse through the newspaper and found where both her husband and herself were listed as being on the honor roll in their high school. Both of us were amazed by her quick find. We printed off the newspaper pages so that she could take them back to Seattle to show to her husband. She quickly gained an understanding of the power of the ever-growing database collection on WorldVitalRecords.com.