Meet Pager, a neat little hack developed during our 24-hour Disrupt NY Hackathon by a team of three engineers. It’s the perfect idea for small business owners who want to turn their Facebook page into a more traditional website.
The team has already worked for restaurant owners, doing freelance work and teaching them how to update their WordPress websites — in many ways, it’s too complicated and cumbersome for these busy people. And yet, I’m sure your favorite bar has a successful Facebook page, and its staff is posting pictures, events and wall posts all the time.
“The main idea with this hack is to allow small businesses who use Facebook to manage a website,” Darrel-Day Guerrero told me. “With Facebook, they can just post to Facebook and everyone knows how it works,” Alex Ilea said.
The set-up process is very simple once you have an instance of Pager running. When you start the app, you first log in using your Facebook account. Then you’re presented with a list of your Facebook pages. You pick a page, save and your site is automagically live.
Everything is sorted into four categories — About, News, Events and Galleries. The About page is supposed to present all your business’s contact info and opening hours, the news page displays your wall posts, and events and galleries are pretty self-explanatory.
Not everything works just yet, but the team implemented all the underlying code that leverages the Facebook API. “We were pretty productive until one or two A.M… then it was harder,” Ilea said.
Alex Ilea, Anton Shevchenko and Darrel-Day Guerrero all knew each other before participating in the hackathon. So there is a chance they will keep iterating on the project after today, and I really hope they do. But maybe it’s time to get some rest first.
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