Aloha Cocoa

To celebrate the launch of Flickpad, we are giving away copies of Flickpad, Flickr Pro accounts, and an iPad!  Each day from today until Friday, we will post a message on Twitter. All you need to do is retweet the message and follow @flickpad, and you are automatically entered to win.  Each day, we will randomly select ten winners for a copy of Flickpad and one winner for a one year Flickr Pro account. Finally, on Friday, if we reach 815 or more followers, we will choose one lucky follower who will get Flickpad, a Flickr Pro account, and a brand new iPad!  You will be notified via direct message if you win.  Good luck and enjoy Flickpad.

Contest Rules:
1) You must have at least 10 Twitter followers to be eligible
2) One retweet enters you for all days of the contest
3) Multiple/Excessive entries will make you ineligible
4) Obvious spam or fake Twitter accounts will be treated as ineligible
5) Anyone found to use multiple accounts to enter will be ineligible
6) Make sure @flickpad is in your retweet
7) Make sure to follow @flickpad
8) Must be US resident to win iPad

Update (8/24/2010) - The contest officially ended on 8/20/2010 but we will still be giving away an iPad when we hit 815 Twitter followers.  Make sure to follow the rules.  One tweet and a follow is all it takes to enter.

Facebook is awesome, and I love browsing photos from all my friends, but I must say that I find it cumbersome.  I often miss new photos that have been posted because I don’t happen to check Facebook soon enough after photos were posted and they got lost in the news feed.  Also, clicking through albums often leaves me with a browser history that makes using the back button in the browser pretty much useless.

When the iPad was first announced, I saw a huge opportunity to improve the way people view Facebook photos.  The iPad by it’s very nature, encourages interaction and enjoyment of photos.  The iPad received a lot of negative press early on because of what it was not, a laptop replacement.  To me, the iPad has always been meant to primarily sit on a coffee table and take the place of magazines, newpapers, tv guides, remote controls, internet browsers, handheld games, game consoles, and more.  

It is with that use in mind that we designed Flickpad.  While having your morning coffee or vegging out after work, you can quickly catch up with all the photos your friends have been posting on Facebook.  It really is addictive and fun to use.

Check out Flickpad in the app store.

While working on our latest app for the iPad, Flickpad, I have been knee deep in Facebook FQL.  FQL provides a powerful, albeit resource limited, way to access Facebook data.  FQL is loosely inspired by SQL, pretty much just implementing the most basic syntax features.  There are no joins allowed, tables must be queried on at least one of there indexed fields, IN is supported but NOT IN is not.  Facebook provides one nugget though, fql.multiquery.  Mutliquery allows you to batch up multiple queries and send them in one request.  It also allows queries to reference the results of other queries in the batch.  Documentation on multiquery is pretty limited so I figure I would put up a sample from Flickpad.   This particular multiquery is pulling all albums, comments, likes, and users for a given set of photos (users is pulling users based on the comments query).

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