Facebook hackathon yields apps for your likes and connections
The company's worldwide search to surface the best developers and products ends with apps that bookmark "Likes," make sense of friend connections, and more.
Facebook developers from Taipei, Taiwan; Buenos Aires, Argentina; and Moscow have won Facebook's worldwide hackathon, with apps that let users bookmark "Likes," tell stories, and analyze connections.
The social network announced its winners today after holding the competition in 12 cities, including Moscow, where Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg made an appearance. Facebook works hard to keep up its hacker culture even as it continues to grow and to face pressure to make money.
As part of that culture, the social network holds hackathons -- all-night programming competitions -- to surface the outside talents and encourage the development of new products.
This latest worldwide competition ended with these three teams beating out more than 2,000 developers and more than 330 apps:
• Taipei, Taiwan: Paperclip.io indexes and sorts the things you've liked on Facebook and across the web, so you can browse your Likes by category or by the date you liked them.
• Buenos Aires, Argentina: Chained Story is a web version of a storytelling game in which players take turns adding a sentence or paragraph to a story. The completed story can be published to a user's timeline.
• Moscow, Russia: BoostMate analyzes your social graph and the connections you have with all your friends, producing a ranking of who you're closest to, who you interact with least, and whether those interactions were positive.
The grand prize? A trip to Facebook's Menlo Park, Calif., headquarters to meet with the Facebook engineering team.
Check out more teams and products here.