Jesse Stay - Facebook Application Development For Dummies

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Facebook Application Development For Dummies

by Jesse Stay

Facebook Application Development For Dummies

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Copyright 2011 by Wiley Publishing, Inc., Indianapolis, Indiana

Published by Wiley Publishing, Inc., Indianapolis, Indiana

Published simultaneously in Canada

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2011926323

ISBN: 978-0-470-76873-0

Manufactured in the United States of America

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About the Author

Jesse Stay began his career at age 10 as a developer writing BASIC programs in his spare time. He would frequently be found copying programs from the back of 3-2-1 Contact magazines and reading ahead, way ahead, in the books of his computer programming classes in high school. In third grade, Stay won third place in his elementary school computer fair, going against the likes of kids several years older than he was. For his Boy Scout Eagle Scout project, Stay wrote a computer program in Pascal to help track the blood types of those in his local church congregation.

At the same time, as an avid entrepreneur, Stay was always looking for the next way to make money from the lemonade stands as a kid, to selling T-shirts from the artwork of others in his high school art class, to his own lawn-mowing business. He always had a knack for making money grow on trees, something his parents always told him wasnt possible.

Later on in life, Stay worked under the direction of the VP of marketing at CWDKids.com. It was there that he was put in charge of helping with the affiliate marketing and search engine marketing programs for the company. He built many scripts in both Perl and VBA to help in this effort. Later, at Media General (a publishing company, owner of many news organizations throughout the Southeast), Stay worked to make print classifieds profitable online by developing creative techniques to help customers find what they were looking for. He took that knowledge to BackCountry.com, where he built an innovative ad management platform to build and buy thousands of ads, saving the company thousands while increasing sales.

It was the combination of his background in SEM, affiliate, and classified ad tools and management; his entrepreneurial spirit; and his passion for programming that drove Stay to realize the power of social networking APIs and Facebook Platform. Stay quickly realized that with social networking, his software could sell itself.

In 2007, Stay left his full-time job to start his own consulting company. Since then, Stay has written three books on Facebook and Facebook development; consulted for some of the most successful brands in social media; opened his own startup, SocialToo.com, which Stay still runs today; and built a successful blog with thousands of followers. Stay has also written developer documentation online for Facebook itself as a contractor. Even today, Stay believes in making money grow on trees through entrepreneurship and savvy business techniques.

Stay maintains and administers numerous Facebook Pages with fans numbered in the hundreds of thousands and Twitter accounts with followers in the tens of thousands, and he has written for some of the top blogs on the Internet. Three of those include InsideFacebook.com, AllFacebook.com, and LouisGray.com.

Stay has been named by Mashable.com as one of 20 developers to follow on Twitter and one of 10 entrepreneurs to follow on Twitter. Stay was also named by Entrepreneur magazine as one of 20 developers to follow on Twitter by Mashables Ben Parr.

Stay currently works (he calls it service) as social media architect and manager of social strategy and solutions for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the Mormons). In his current position, Stay gets to help build relationships and social technologies for some of the largest humanitarian organizations in the world. In addition to that, Stay works with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir on its social strategy, as well as FamilySearch.org, which has the worlds largest database of linked individuals (Stay proudly calls it the worlds largest social network). Stay believes firmly in using social technologies to build fruitful relationships that have a strong effect on the world.