Marketing Ninja

Alright, as promised, it’s time for me to reveal my first published Facebook application: ADOOGA Contest of the Day. I’ve started several applications and built many of them to 90% completion, but Vanderbilt’s coursework usually found a way to interfere with my production schedule and forced me to table release until later.

The last 10% is always the hardest part, after all.

What Does ADOOGA Do?

ADOOGA is an online firm that specializes in syndicating brand-based online contests.

• If you’re a film maker and you want to find an online contest to submit some of your work;
• if you’re a programmer and you want to put your skills to the test in a competitive project design contest;
• or if you’re a creative type of any sort and you want to earn some revenue in a sponsored contest,

then ADOOGA has a contest somewhere in its database that may help you earn some winnings by virtue of your creative capacities. That’s my elevator pitch on what ADOOGA does. You can learn more about their organization on ADOOGA’s about page.

What Does ADOOGA Contest of the Day Do?

ADOOGA Contest of the Day is a pretty simple, unintrusive Facebook application. It downloads the seven most recent “Contests of the Day” from ADOOGA and enables you to share them with your friends by publishing the contest into your mini feed.

The application doesn’t put anything on your profile page and it doesn’t publish any content without your consent.

If you’re one of the creative types that I outlined earlier, then you might enjoy getting instant access to ADOOGA’s premiere contests via your Facebook account.

How Did I Build It?

While I’m not going to write a highly detailed post on how ADOOGA Contest of the Day is constructed given that ADOOGA owns the intellectual property, I’ll quickly iterate over some of the technology I used:

• ASP.NET
• Facebook.NET – FBML implementation
• XSLT 1.0 – Used it for generating FBML output (yes, you can do that with XSL)
• XPath/XQuery
• FBJS – Used it for modal dialogs and Facebook’s handy AJAX library

I was tempted to use Mock AJAX, but it proved to be unsuitable given the method I utilized for producing the FBML output.

Go ahead and check out the application and let me know what you think!

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