Diplomacy on Facebook is an interesting little community that I started almost nine years ago. I am by no means an expert diplomacy player; In high school I had a few friends who would play it often and I joined in on some of those occasions. I was a budding web developer and I had my eye out for ideas for websites that I could build. When Facebook started inviting developers to create games and tools that would appear within their site, I got the idea that a Diplomacy community would be a good project to utilize this new platform. Rather than writing my own software to run the site, I found the open source PHPDiplomacy software and began to modify it for the Facebook platform.  Once I had made the game available to the public it grew pretty quickly; more quickly than I was prepared for anyway. There were plenty of hiccups and problems since I was still an amateur developer running a complicated community. Fortunately, I got help from some volunteer moderators so that I could focus on technical problems without dealing with moderation issues. I have kept the site running through many different phases and changes in my life. During some periods, I actively worked to improve it and grow it, while a lot of times I gave it less attention than it deserved. Multiple times I tried to transition to a newer version of the PHPDiplomacy software and ended up reverting back to the original after many games broke and it just didn't seem like it was worth the hassle. When the iPhone came out, and apps for mobile became a growing trend, I decided to build a Diplomacy iPhone App. I spent hours in the basement of the dorm where I lived working on it. I was still an amateur developer, so it took me longer than perhaps it should have, and in hindsight, I should have looked for help from more experienced designers and developers. I finally released it to the world. It wasn't as popular as my initial Facebook site had been, but perhaps that was mostly due to the $2.99 price tag I had put on it. It grew steadily and the version that exists now (without the price tag) has almost 700 users every month. It's still something I want to work on and improve, but recently other projects have been taking most of my time and attention. I have so many ideas for improvements and even apps for other platforms, hopefully, some of them will come to fruition in the not-too-distant future. The current iPhone App allows a user to login with Facebook, or with Apple's GameCenter login. The games are the same games as the Facebook community, so you might play with people who are only using the Facebook site. Once you join a game you can use the touch interface to give your orders. It is perhaps most useful if you use it along with the Facebook site so that you get a bit more information about the outcomes of orders. As we all know our modern world is incredibly mobile. We don't all have the opportunity to be at a computer at the right times to submit our orders in online Diplomacy games. If the Diplomacy community is going to retain users and grow, I think having great mobile interfaces is very important. If players can chat and submit orders easily from a mobile device, I think they will be much more likely to stay involved in games. I've become a much better developer and designer in the past couple of years and I hope to make improvements to the App to make it much more attractive to the average user. I hope to introduce modern app users to the fun of Diplomacy. There's nothing else quite like it. It has the power to bring people together from all over the world in a unique way. Editor's Note: For more information on Chris Hughes, see his Wikipedia article. I assure you you will be surprised. Chris Hughes (chris@speedycomputing.com) If you wish to e-mail feedback on this article to the author, and clicking on the envelope above does not work for you, feel free to use the "Dear DP..." mail interface.