So we’re well into our 8th week in the fbFund REV incubator; and it’s been a blast. I left the office at 3am yesterday and I didn’t need to turn off the lights because I wasn’t the last one leaving. It’s one awesome experience.My name is Waleed, and I’m the founder of Ninua, Inc., an early stage Internet startup . Back in Feb. 2008, a few friends and I organized a 3-day hackathon for Facebook applications called WeekendApps. The idea was to show up on a Friday evening, team up with other developers, build a Facebook app, and release it by Sunday. It was a fun weekend, and by Sunday evening, we had 11 teams demo their live apps to a big crowd eager to see what could be built in one weekend. That’s where my brother, Zaid, and I launched NetworkedBlogs (at that time, we called it “Blogs I Read”).
After WeekendApps, we continued to work on our app and we changed it’s name to “Blog Networks” (which was later changed to NetworkedBlogs because we couldn’t get the blognetworks.com domain). We barely got any users in the early days. It wasn’t easy getting a utility app to grow on the Facebook platform, which at the time was overrun by super viral hugging and kissing apps. By May 2008, the app was solid enough to attract users, but not many. I wasn’t sure whether the app will ever grow, so I put a goal for us to reach or else kill the app and move on. I believe that if I’m going to fail, I’d rather fail fast. The goal was to reach a total of 20K installs, 2K daily active users, and a total of 8000 registered blogs by July 1st. So we got busy trying to make it happen, and we released a lot of improvements very quickly. As July got closer, we were close to reaching our goal, but it didn’t look like we were going to make it. However, just a day before our deadline, on June 30th, Sarah Perez wrote a post about us on ReadWriteWeb that gave us the final push we needed to pass the threshold. Thanks Sarah 
It was a close one.
It was a close one.NetworkedBlogs is now the largest blog and news community on Facebook with 600K monthly active users, and 200K registered blogs. Along the way, my other brother, Rafid, joined us and we launched the NetworkedBlogs.com Web site, added more social features, and released a widget that’s now installed on thousands of blogs. Our goal is to help bloggers reach a wider audience by tapping into the Facebook social graph and benefiting from the huge growth opportunity there. We do that through several services such as pulling your blog feed to your personal profile or fan page, and adding a profile box, an info section, and a blog tab. We also show you what blogs your friends write and follow, and what articles are getting attention.
NetworkedBlogs is evolving into a news reader that taps into the social graph to filter news. We’re on our way, but we have a long way to go.
One of the first things that Dave McClure taught us when the fbFund REV program started is to write a 3-slide presentation that captures what we’re doing in a a brief and compelling way. My first version was, well, okay. So I’ll end this post with my second attempt.
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