Last night Facebook held another of its famous ‘Hackathons‘, that saw employees taking a break from their daily coding jobs to spend some time working on their passion projects.
Given that Facebook has an impending IPO, things have been kept relatively quiet from the media, save for the facts that the Hackathon started at 7pm local time at the company’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California, and that there was a keg and food available to keep people awake all night long.
There have been around 30 Hackathons at Facebook, and these have resulted in some of the original concepts for features that we now use everyday. One such Hackathon saw a team create a project called ‘Memories’ that pulled together a summary of each year full of photos and updates with the most likes… this was the earliest incarnation of the Facebook Timeline.
Facebook Chat also sprang from one of these events.
So here’s a question for you – if you had all of coding knowhow of one of Facebook’s top programmers and were able to assemble a team of your choosing for a Hackathon, what would you do to make Facebook better? We’d love to hear your ideas for new functionality within the existing framework of Facebook, or even your suggestions for completely new features.
Feel free to leave a comment below or drop us a message on Twitter or the SocialSafe Facebook page.
I would make apps more accessible and integrated into the interface. An optional calendar on the front page would be cool for example…