It’s jarring, at first, seeing a room packed with twenty-year-olds and middle-aged developers, each with a Facebook page splashed across their screen. For a service initially intended for an American college crowd, to see such widespread adoption of the social networking juggernaut is astounding. Yet, it is this fevered interest that has made Toronto one of Facebook’s largest networks, and a prime location for those looking to develop for the site.

FacebookCamp Toronto held its fifth Facebook Developers Garage Tuesday night at the MaRS Collaboration Centre, on 101 College Street, the latest in a series of talks since developer group’s inception over two years ago. An “unconference for everyone with an interest in building on the Facebook Platform,” according to organizers, the evening brought together marketers, designers, students and developers from all over Toronto looking to create and integrate with the popular social network.

With over 400 attendees attending each of FacebookCamp Toronto’s scheduled events, its clear that Toronto has a thing for Facebook. In fact, of all Toronto’s active Internet users, it’s believed that around 70% are active users on the site.

“It’s taking real world connections, and solidifying them on Facebook,” explains Matt Wyndowe of the site’s popularity, a developer and engineer from Facebook in Paolo Alto, California. A Canadian native, Wyndowe traveled to Toronto to join other presenters in one of Facebook’s newest initiatives, Facebook Connect. Launched at the beginning of December, it’s a new platform that Wyndowe is particularly excited about, and feels could have a big impact upon users and developers in cities like Toronto.

Connect is all about taking the Facebook user base, and using it on the Internet in a more general capacity, he explains. The goal is to allow Facebook users to navigate the web in such a way that their Facebook information and profiles can be seamlessly integrated into some of the Internet’s most popular and high-traffic sites.

“Imagine you have a site with ‘most watched’, ‘most viewed’, and ‘most emailed’” says Wyndowe. “Imagine what you would get if you replaced that with ‘most watched by my friends’ or ‘most viewed by my friends’. More people will be interested in that.”

One example, which Wyndowe hopes will soon be implemented in cities like Toronto, is a website called CitySearch. While there are already hundreds of websites across Toronto that offer restaurant, theatre and other reviews, CitySearch’s goal is to bring all of those together into one central, user-driven platform. But what makes CitySearch unique is how it utilizes the Facebook Connect platform.

Friends already using the CitySearch service are added instantly, based on a user’s Facebook friends, while reviews and recommendations from these same friends are given a higher priority on CitySearch’s homepage. The result is a highly streamlined and more intimate system – one that recognizes a user will be far more likely to respond to the input of their friends, over a seemingly unknown critic in Toronto.

More so, it’s a system that makes the external web easier for users to navigate.
Dimi Paun, another developer also presenting at last night’s FacebookCamp, took the stage to describe how his travel photo website, Zipalong, has incorporated the Connect platform.

“Dealing with customers, you realize very quickly that nobody likes the signup process,” Paun explained, while presenting slides of Zipalong’s old registration process. “Everybody hates it. So we jumped on the opportunity to use Facebook Connect.”

Using Connect, users are presented with a one-click sign-in process that uses their existing Facebook profile – a far cry from the complicated, multi-form system of old. The result, according to Facebook, has been a 20-100% increase in registrations on some sites, with connected users creating between 25-60% more content. Already, sites like CNN, Gawker Media, and even Toronto-based BikingToronto have begun to adopt the simplified system, in attempt to attract more users to their sites.

But while Facebook Connect dominated most of the evening, developers also took the opportunity to discuss tips and challenges when developing for Facebook’s year-old application platform.

Roy Pereira of Toronto-based marketing agency Refresh Partners, explained the development process behind his company’s wildly successful “Whopper Sacrifice” application. What began as a modest Burger King advertising campaign grew into an American sensation, allowing Facebook users to sacrifice – or, delete – 10 of their friends, in exchange for a free Whopper coupon from Burger King. And while “Whopper Sacrifice” proved a novel idea, indeed, it presented some interesting problems for Pereira and his team.

“We discovered pretty early on that there wasn’t actually any Facebook API for deleting friends,” remarked Pereira with a laugh. For a website that pushes new social interactions and networking, it’s hardly surprising; Pereira’s team found they had to write their own system to allow the application to achieve its sacrificial goals.

But most importantly, Pereira remarks, is that unlike other applications which divert the attention of users away from Facebook, “Whopper Sacrifice” made users focus on the Facebook platform itself. Updates to the minifieed allowed friends to see exactly who had been sacrificed, while also generating increased interest, and higher traffic to the application.

The importance of making applications and websites take advantage of Facebook’s social capabilities as much as possible is incredibly important. “I can see what my friends are saying. That’s what makes this interesting and engaging,” says Wyndowe on the impact of applications like “Whopper Sacrifice”, and the Facebook Connect platform as whole.
And for a Facebook network as large and diverse as Toronto’s own, the number of people developers hope to engage is almost limitless.