Last night I got a quick peak under the covers of some popular Facebook apps at the Facebook Application Development meetup that was held at AOL.

The talks started with one on porting your Facebook app to Bebo given by Blake Commagere of Mogad, the programmer behind the Vampires, Werewolves and Zombie apps on Facebook. He gave a great talk that was clear and encouraging to all the developers in the room. The best part was all of the praise that he had for Steve Cohen and his platform development team at Bebo, who was in the audience to answer specific questions. Bebo has made it a point to parallel Facebooks application programming by using the same function names and call formats. But the latest announced changes to the application networking by Facebook may damage that. Bebo does not agree with many of the changes that Facebook has made to protect their users from unnecessary spam and other possible abuses.

Many of these “abuses” are designed by the programmer to help spread the application virally. According to what Blake has seen with his applications, Bebo is actually a better platform for spreading many applications. This idea was confirmed by Steve, who used an application called or provided by Gaia. It is a virtual world for the Bebo user’s avatars to roam in. Even though it does not have a viral way to spread built in, it is the fifth most popular app on Bebo.

Blake made an interesting point that I had never considered. Facebook is primarily about helping people to communicate with people in their groups. Bebo is primarily about self-expression. Since many apps on Facebook are about self-expression, they should do well if ported to Bebo.

Blake previous programming experience convinced him that the port from Facebook to Bebo would allow a programmer to keep about 90% of their original code. Porting to an OpenSocial platform like Orkut would result in the lose of 50% of the code. In general, he did not like the OpenSocial software, primarily because its documentation, even across several different social network platforms were very weak. Also he did not have kind words for Hi5’s developer effort. He said that their sandbox fails 75% of the time and that it has been a problem since May.

Blake thought that trying to make your application run simultaneously in Facebook, Bebo, and other social platforms was a bad idea. But the next speaker had products that did just that. Kyle Ellis of AOL UserPlane demonstrated a WebChat that worked across websites and social network.  These products are available white label. The cost depends on the number of channels and the max usage per month.

I like the talk given by John Smart of Zoosk. Their online dating site has a cross-platform app that works on many social networks. In his company’s case they used iFrames to hold their content. They had to do some fancy programming to prevent Facebook and other sites from timing out too quickly. I really need to get his slides. It was probably the most technical of the talks, but I really enjoyed seeing the nuts and bolts of the project from someone who did not sugar coat it.