Web Niraj

The Tropic Thunder Facebook Game was created to promote Ben Stiller’s Tropic Thunder movie for Paramount. The game allows users to play five levels of a top-down shooter, created specifically for Tropic Thunder, using various assets. Each level is unique in its own way, and each level contains its own “boss”. The aim of the game is to collect as many “Crying Monkey” awards as possible and racking up points.

If the user is still alive after completing the five levels, the game starts again, but the score continues. However, the game gets harder with each level. On completing the game, the player’s score is added to the Leaderboard and the user received a “Acting” rank and “Action” rank.

After the US launch of the movie, the application was updated and localized to four additional languages for the European launch. Towards the end of the campaign, the application had over 70,000 users.

The game itself was developed in Flash. The remainder of the application, flash integration and leaderboard components were build in PHP. There were some technical challenges in connecting PHP and Flash within Facebook, as there was no Facebook API available in Flash during the development phase.

The Comedy UK application was built for MySpace UK, in order to promote their Comedy Channel. The application was built entirely in JavaScript, making use of OpenSocial and MyOpenSpace (MySpace’s OpenSocial implementation). The application lets users watch comedy clips using a custom built Flash video player.

Video content, images and information are pulled in through a XML feed managed by MySpace UK. The application was originally built using PHP and MySpace’s REST API but was later rewritten to use JavaScript.

The application can be found here.

For MediaGuardian’s Facebook Fanpage, I build several applications to bring in information from the official website. We build a photo application called “Top 100 Movers and Schmoozers” which read in photo tags from photos uploaded on the fan page. People tagged in the photos are then shown on the leaderboard.

Three RSS applications were also build to bring in official content. This included the latest jobs and new articles from the MediaMonkey and OrganGrinder blogs. You can see all the application on MediaGuardian’s Facebook Fan Page.

The HSBC Premier iGoogle Gadget was built using Facebook Connect to link to the complete application within Facebook. The facebook application was intended to be a professional network of friends within Facebook’s platform, similar to LinkedIn. Users could ask for introductions to other users, add their professional skills and connect to other professionals.

The iGoogle Gadget for HSBC Premier was the first implementation of Facebook Connect within iGoogle. The Facebook Connect functionality was only a few weeks old when I worked on integrating it into the application. Unfortunately, the application never went live.

Of course this happens with some other applications I worked on, for example another Facebook applications, an online casino site (www.casino.com), and a microsites. Although the sites and applications never went live, I did gain experience in using new technologies.

The F400Share application was a cross-platform application developed for Facebook and Bebo, to promote the new Samsung F400 mobile phone. The aim of the campaign was to get users to upload a audio clip of themselves singing a song, for a chance to be features in Samsung’s nation-wide advertising campaign.

The application was launched in Jone 2008 and allowed users to listen to the uploaded tracks and vote for their favourite ones. Four winners were chosen at the end of the campaign. The application used a flash based music player. I did the PHP/MySQL coding to handle file upload and recording of statistics. The top tracks received over 10,00 votes each.

After the campaign, the applications on both Facebook and Bebo were taken offline.