USV hosted a hackathon of Facebook developers tonight. There wasn’t too much hacking going on (could be because we went through so much beer I had to make a second trip to the store in the middle of the event). But, there was a lot of incredibly intelligent discussion about the pros and cons of developing for the Facebook platform right now.

The highlight of the night was a series of demos:

• I was particularly impressed by Amit and Gil’s Amazin’ Giftbox app. Virtual gifts are quite viral, and this app unlocks all of Amazon’s icon inventory to be both virtually and physically gifted to another user. I see this app getting very hot.
• Aryeh Goldsmith’s My Bucks app is exciting. He created a virtual currency (Facebucks) to be used inside Facebook and other apps. Currently, there’s not much to spend Facebucks on, but people are still fascinated with collecting the currency. The metaphor of money is very powerful. It taps into the same social phenomenon that drives the daily wealth creation effort that almost everyone participates in. I can’t wait to see what happens as Facebucks start to get assigned value (or conversion rate) compared to both time and USD.
• Finally, this was not demoed by the author tonight, but Amit did give a quick tour of Appsaholic, a Facebook app to measure the growth of Facebook apps. It has some very sexy visualizations, and it’s fun to see so many graphs bending into steep hockey stick curves :)

Thanks to all the people who demoed tonight, and A BIG thanks to Amit Gupta for bringing his Facebook group to USV. I think this event went really well, and I look forward to hosting future developer meetups like this in the future at USV.