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ETech: K-Factor's Social Network For Social Network Developers

Some companies here at ETech are so new they don't even have business cards yet. Jing Chen flew in a mere hour before she was expected to demo K-Factor Media's Developer Analytics at AppNite in San Diego, and it turned out to be one of the more compelling early success stories. In the not too distant future, she won't have to be giving out slips of paper with her e-mail address instead of business cards.

The company was founded, as these so frequently are, by developers. Launched just two months ago, it decided to create a community around Facebook development and move outward.

The first order of business has been to provide new, young developers with some training and shared learning from the community. There are some application case studies, interviews, and an analytics application that gives the developer a sense of their application.

The analytics offer statistics on how all Facebook applications are doing so people can compare their app performance. It monitors statistics, daily activity trends, and even demographic data and user application overlap. Chen noted that while Google Analytics looks at Web applications, it doesn't dive into the specifics that social network developers need, like the virality (average number of users) and engagement (return users) that are crucial to these applications.

Some communities already exist around developers -- certainly Dev Shed and SourceForge come to mind. The difference here -- besides the focus on social networks -- is that these relationships exist in the friendly confines of the social network community, where you can check out the status of your "friends" and their applications.

Chen wouldn't say specifically how many developers are part of the community, but she said that the group represents some 100 million users among the application installed base across that community.

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