I attended the Facebook Developer Garage in Toronto earlier this week and have noted some key points that I found helpful and think other developers might be interested in.

There were about 450 attendees from the Greater Toronto Area. By a rough show of hands it looked like 40% developers, 40% business people, and 20% other who are just interested in Facebook in general.

Meagan Marks from Facebook gave a nice presentation on making the most of integrating with the platform. She noted that Canada has 10% of all Facebook application developers and the Toronto developer community is one of the ten biggest in the world. She suggested to use as much of the platform as possible to interact with users noting that this is where the most popular applications seem to be succeeding.

Greg Thomson talked about his My Aquarium application and walked through some of the issues he has gone through as his application became more and more popular. For serving his JPEG images he moved from a basic web server to the Amazon S3 service. He described some issues with FBML which seems to have a failure rate of around 5%. He also mentioned to carefully decide between MyISAM and InnoDB tables when building a MySQL 5 database. He is in the process of converting to InnoDB for considerable performance gains.

For more details and information on other presentations check out Colin Smillie’s recap at Inside Facebook.

Thanks to Colin Smillie, Roy Pereira, and Andrew Cherwenka for their great work on getting this event off the ground.