First Assignment Ended!!!

That was a tough experience. Though we devoted most of our time to the FB assignment. The outcomes are not always proportional to the effort. There must be something wrong...about the first assignment, there is a misunderstanding of the goal. It's supposed to be a test of ideas, a practice to familiarise ourselves with the process of building facebook app, and also an opportunity to back up our knowledge of web programing or designing. Without  keeping all these goals in minds, sometimes we focused too much one thing, and urged quick success too much.

In this case, our team focused too much on the technology but ignored some other aspects. At first, the idea is not so eye-catching. Campus Sale focused on second-hand market place in campus. The problem is that there are already so many other mature platforms (like ebay, amazon, singapore has hardware zone,V-R zone). Even facebook has its official app "marketplace".  After investigating the marketplace on facebook, we found the such app is not so popular in facebook(rated 3,many negative feedbacks). It can be interpreted in two ways:1 the marketplace like app cannot get popular under facebook  2 we got a chance to defeat the poor "marketplace" app. Though the second assumption seems impossible, anyway we still take it to start our first assignment. At first I really disagreed with the idea, but I cannot come up with  any other good ideas. I am also not persuasive enough . So our team agree on the Campus Sale at last.

Actually I thought we really had a chance to make it popular though the chance is small. I read most of the feedback of the facebook marketplace, there are complains about the UI, some bugs such as the app can not remember user's loacation. I believe we can do better in terms of  user experience because we are users ourselves and know exactly the what functionality users need. But another big problem is advertising, it's too hard for us to buid our user base. We see that even the "marketplace" is granted the title of facebook official, it can hardly shake the foundation of tradtional  second-hand forum or ebay. So the problem is too big. Even we have friendly UI, and powerful functionality, we still have to advertise and wait for users to change their habbits otherwise we cannot survive.  Just now while I am writing this , I recieved a notification from the facebook marketplace, they are encouraging users to post listings to get a chance to win a "nexus one".  Ya, they are improving. So now I completely gave up..I want a nexus one!!! 

Ok, it's time to forget about it. Anyway we learned a lot of basic skills during the first assignment. Like PHP, Html, API and some Javascript. We also missed some key points while programming busily. Like how to promote and advertise our apps, how to handle user's feedbacks. Our teamwork also has some problems. The communication and coherence should be improved. The schedule is also implicit. It's a bit like water fall...that's why we submit it a bit late. Maybe it's because we are not familiar with the whole process at the beginning. Hope we can do it better next time.

Well, our app's main functions all work quite good (maybe has some minor bugs). Cheers to our first FB assignment. Visit it here pls: http://apps.facebook.com/campus_sale/