Partnership Opportunities

For those of you who follow this blog, it may seem like we haven’t been too active for a while. Let me assure you that this is very far from the truth – in fact we’ve been very busy lately. We’re now ready to give you a small peek behind the curtain to let you know what we’ve been up to.

When we originally conceived of FriendRunner we imagined that it would be an all-in-one tool that customers could use to load test their Facebook applications. That’s what we built, and so far it’s worked out fairly well. However, we’re beginning to realize that there are some things we could be doing better:

FriendRunner duplicates functionality that exists in other tools

FriendRunner needs to do things like record and edit test scripts, graph timing results, and lots of other things that standard load testing tools already do (and frankly do very well). Duplicating this effort in FriendRunner takes our attention away from providing more features on the Facebook-centric aspects that really add value.

FriendRunner customers need to learn yet another tool

People who want to load test Facebook applications don’t spontaneously appear – they typically have experience load testing other web applications and have experience with other load testing tools. Forcing these people to read new documentation and learn how to use a new user interface seems like a waste of their time. Since they’re already experts in other tools, it would be better if we allowed them to use FriendRunner through them.

People are very clever and come up with usage scenarios for FriendRunner that we never imagined

We occasionally come across potential customers who want to do things with FriendRunner that it was never really designed to do. Instead of saying “No, No, No, you’re using it wrong!!” we’d much rather embrace those people’s resourcefulness and provide them with a great solution.

All of this points to the fact that we’d be much better off by modularizing FriendRunner, and allowing other tools to do part of the work where appropriate. And that’s what we’ve been working on, so now FriendRunner can be easily integrated with other load testing tools to allow them to test Facebook applications. This opens up a world of possibilities for others to partner with us to provide load testing services for Facebook applications.

Load Testing Tool Vendors

This one’s pretty obvious. Standard load testing tools can’t really deal with Facebook applications, but they can now thanks to FriendRunner. There are several ways of integrating FriendRunner with another tool ranging from the really simple to the highly integrated (which is still pretty easy to do). Vendors of these tools that would like to learn more about how to do this should look here.

Load Testing QA Consultants

Consultants that perform QA services for other companies can expand their offerings by using FriendRunner. Since FriendRunner can work with existing load testing tools, the learning curve is very small and they can be offering services in no time. QA consultants that would like to learn more about this should look here.

Digital Media Agencies

Agencies and contractors who build Facebook applications for brands and companies can use Friendrunner as an additional premium service to offer to their customers. To learn more about how you can benefit while offering your customers more services, have a look here.