If you’ve ever wondered who created Graffiti, the wildly popular Facebook application that allows users to doodle on friends’ walls, look no further than this campus. His name is Ted Suzman, and he’s a junior right here at Washington University.
Suzman, who justifiably wants to switch his major from biomedical engineering to computer science, works together with an entrepreneurial team, which includes his brother Mark and friend Tim.
Last summer, Suzman and his team worked on a network that they called Artwall that had a feature allowing the user to draw on other people’s profiles. When Facebook later announced that they were launching a platform to allow people to build applications on Facebook, his friends and he saw the potential opportunity to add this drawing feature to Facebook.
“We programmed it over Memorial Day weekend and launched it that Monday,” said Suzman. “I was sitting in my room…for 40 hour stretches working on it.”
His team and he shared the work in developing the application and each worked toward their strengths.
“For Graffiti, I guess I was the only one who did the programming work, but there was plenty of work for all of us,” said Suzman. “We make all of our decisions by consensus. It works out well.”
Since it’s launch, the users of Graffiti have grown exponentially.
“People seem to really like it,” he said. “They enjoy it. It’s a fun thing, it’s a communication tool. People use it for all sorts of different purposes. There are actually artists who have come on and have done some really amazing work.”
Kristina McKay, a senior who has used Graffiti, said it is a fun way to communicate on Facebook and is more creative than a message or a wall post.
While Suzman said that 1,500 users add the application per hour today on average, at peak this number was 6,000-7,000 per hour. Knowing that almost seven million people use it today, Suzman related an interesting fact.
“About 1/1,000 people in the world use it,” he said. “That kind of hit me.”
To keep up with his rapidly growing application, Suzman has had to make some adjustments that haven’t allowed him much time to sit back and pat himself and his team on the back as most would.
Suzman has also been busy working on new developments for Graffiti, one of which is a gallery feature where users can view the artwork of others.
“There are so many artists on there,” he said. “One thing we want to do is launch a public gallery where people can submit work that they’ve done and then all the users that come and look at the gallery will be able to vote and if a work gets enough votes, it will start moving up towards the top.”
Junior Madhavi Probhakar praised the idea.
“That’s a really cool development,” she said. “I don’t use Graffiti that often, but people I know have shown me their friends’ artwork. They look like professional pieces of art.”
Beyond Graffiti, Suzman has been working on another application for the past few weeks which he will not divulge.
“It’s so rabidly competitive out there that if somebody learned what we were doing they would jump on it and try to do it first,” he said.
However, he does make one promise: “People at Wash. U. will be the first to know,” he said.
His new application is in line with his opinion of where Facebook is going.
“Right now, [Facebook] is a fun tool that people use a lot,” he said. “I see it as becoming a lot more fundamental and actually being a major change in the way people work together and how people meet each other. I think eventually, it will increase social capital, which is the connections between people and the value that those connections create. People are more likely of help to a stranger if there is a lot of social capital around just because people are tighter as a community. And I think Facebook will help with that.”
In order to devote more time to his entrepreneurial ambitions, Suzman has become a part-time student. While his and his team’s first concern is building applications for Facebook, he does have business ambitions of developing a team of programmers.
“We’re all about building great applications and the business goals are secondary,” he said. “[However], we do want to have a team building applications. If there’s any really good programmers out there looking for a job, they should give me a yell.”