Integrating with Facebook

There has been a lot of discussion lately about Facebook in various forums. The company seems to have been painted with a bullseye of contreversy, especially since their annoucements at F8 outlining the future of the business and the Open Graph Protocol. While I don’t want to get involved in the overall debate, which has occupied many industry leaders, I would like to take a look at one tiny aspect of the open graph, the Like Button, and how we’re getting involved at Spoonfed.

It was a pretty easy decision for us to impliment a Facebook Like button on the site; we have hundreds of venue and artist details for London places and performers. However we also list over 30,000 events per month – a lot of things for people to ‘like.’ Events are slightly different to artists or venues and don’t necessarily represent a long term interest of our users (long running club night, exhibitions or comedy shows aside). So when we added the ‘Like’ button, we recognised that we also needed a way for users to share events that they liked and wanted to attend in a temporary manner that reflects the temporary nature of the event.

To do that, we added a one-click ‘add this event to Facebook’ button, in addition to the Like button, which would automatically create an event on Facebook and allow our users to quickly and easily invite their friends. Users can still ‘like’ an event but if they want to have access to the event on Facebook while it’s still upcoming, and not have the event details forever tied to their profile after the event is over, creating a Facebook event through Spoonfed is a great option.

We’re interested to see how our users make use of these two funtions on the site, both of which are developed to help Londoners share their favourite events with their friends. We believe that a ‘like’ model that mimics the temporary nature of events themselves will be a great way to encourage more events, from London and farther afield, to get integreated into the Open Graph.

Take a look at what’s on in London on Spoonfed to start liking events and creating events on Facebook for yourself.

Spoonfed and The Courvoisier Future 500 in Observer Magazine

Big news at Spoonfed HQ this week! Henry and I were picked as one of the five winners of  The Observer’s Courvoisier Future 500. The Future 500 is a business network for the UK’s brightest entrepreneurs providing inspiration to businesses across the world.

As part of our inclusion in the CVTF500 we were invited to the Courvoisier Chateau in Jarnac to discuss Spoonfed and our future plans. Joining us on the trip and also in the top 5 are Freddie from Secret Garden Party, Lily Jones of Lily Vanilli cupcakes and founder of Enternships Rajeeb Dey.

I’m in the US until tomorrow so haven’t seen a copy of the article yet, but a friend of mine was kind enough to send me through a scan of the front page.

The full article is now available to read online. There are lots of great companies joining the network this year and we’re really proud to be a part of it.

Award Season

2009 just gets better and better for Spoonfed and as we appraoch the first year anniversary of the site Spoonfed has been honoured with our first awards! Two weeks ago Spoonfed was named as a winner at the Archant North and West London Business Awards in the Best Use of Technology category for our innovative Event Radar iPhone application.

A few days Henry and I were excited (and a little embarassed) to be honoured as finalists at the O2 X Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award. It was a very glitzy event and we had a great time. Sadly we didn’t win but it was a great opportunity to meet some fantastic entrepreneurs, particualrly the winner of this year’s Young Entrepreneur of the Year, Raj Dey of Enternships – a site that hooks up enterprising students and graduates with a placement at a small but fast-growing company.

Spoonfed Teams Up with London for London

We’re always in the charitable spirit at Spoonfed so when London for London asked us to get involved with their big charity event, we jumped at the chance to help out a good cause. London for London is a charity event that aims to help combat anti-social behaviour amongst young people by encouraging bars, clubs and pubs across the city to invite every person who walks through their door that night to donate just £1 to charity. Spoonfed are providing full event listings for every venue taking part, which can be accessed on the London for London and Spoonfed websites.

We’re really proud to be involved with this great charity event, to find out how you can get involved too check out http://www.londonforlondon.com

I Heart Spoonfed Party

To celebrate what’s been a brilliant year in the world of Spoonfed we’re having a party for everybody who’s supported us during the past few years and all the site’s users are invited too! The party, co-ordinated with the regular I Heart DJ nights, is at The Macbeth in Shoreditch on September 11th. Come down and join the fun!

For more details check out the listing on Spoonfed.

Update: Read how the I Heart Spoonfed party went over at the newly revamped Spoonfed Blog!

Get Voting for Spoonfed at SxSW

This year Spoonfed has come up with some great panel discussion topics that we want to present at South by South West and you can help us get there by voting for our proposal. SXSW is part tech conference and part film/music festival, which takes place every year in Austin, Texas. Industry experts regularly look to the event for innovative ideas, exciting directors, new technology solutions and of course, great bands.

We’re really proud of the depth and breadth of content that Spoonfed produces, and we’re ready to share our passion for great on-line editorial with the wider tech community. Our two proposals focus on how to effectively create and manage original content and the reasons why this is so important in the Web 2.0 era.

Content is King: User vs. Editorial Content

Managing Your Content Management System

Voting is a quick and simple process and once you’re signed up you have access to thousands of fascinating proposals. There are dozens of great companies from the UK taking part this year like Huddle and Songkick and you can vote for as many discussions as you like.

So what are you waiting for? Get voting, spread the word, and hopefully one of our panel will get picked!

Voting closes September 4

Spoonfed in the News

Earlier this week Henry and I had a good chat with Alex Bellinger from Small Biz pod. This regular podcast gives advice to small business, and our interview also focused on how Spoonfed all began and covered our plans for the future.

UPDATE: Our interview with Alex Bellinger is now online, listen to it here on Small Biz Pod.

Spoonfed has also been getting some great press for our iPhone app recently and today has been a good reminder of all the nice things people have been writing about the company recently.

Here’s a few quick links to some of our excellent recent press:

Pocket-lint’s Website of the Day
iPhone app of the week: The Spoonfed Radar
iGizmo’s iPhone App of the week
Killer Startups – What’s going on in London
Shiny Media – Stuff we like
Spoonfed’s Free iPhone app

Reuters @ Spoonfed HQ

Today was a special day at Spoonfed towers as we were paid a visit by Matt Cowan, Reuters Technology Correspondant otherwise know as @londonjourno. It was a great chance to talk about our iPhone Event Radar Application and also talk in more general terms about our exciting plans for the second half of 2009. Personally it was an interesting experience to be filmed and interviewed at the same time, especially in front of the whole team. Check out the video below to see how it went.

Spoonfed Shortlisted for Tech Crunch Award

At the beginning of this month the well known technology blog, Tech Crunch launched the Europa Awards, the first Europe-wide tech awards ceremony in London, we today we’ve found out that Spoonfed has made the shortlist!

Click here to see the shortlist for the inaugural Tech Crunch Europa Awards.

The judges are going to review this shortlist and combine their scores with your votes to pick this years finalists. So sign up and get voting now to help Spoonfed to the finals of the first Tech Crunch Europa Awards.

Interview with the Guardian

It was a big coo for Spoonfed this week as I was interviewed by Jemima Kiss for the Guardian TechWeekly Podcast. The interview took the format of an elevator pitch which was a good way to introduce Spoonfed to a new audience and talk about our plans for rest of 2009.

You can download the Tech Weekly podcast and have a listen yourself at Guardian online.