At this year s f8 Conference, Facebook announced the release of Facebook Connect ... (The name change is likely to prevent people from associating negative opinions of Beacon with Connect.)... Third party websites can allow users to log in using their Facebook credentials instead of creating a username and password for yet another website... Fortunately, Facebook came along and offered The Run Around sample web app, which demonstrates how to use the client and includes example code ... CREATE TABLE `users` ( `username` varchar(255) NOT NULL, `name` text, `password` text, `email` text, `fb_uid` int(11) default NULL, `email_hash` varchar(64) default NULL, PRIMARY KEY `username` (`username`) ); From this, it s clear that the username is the primary key for any given user, as would generally be expected... static function createFromFacebookUID($fb_uid) { // *extraneous code stripped out for simplicity* $user_params[ ' username ' ] = ' FacebookUser_ ' ... return $user; } From this, it can be seen that the username field is nothing more than a hack for Facebook users... Depending upon the goals of your website or business, though, you might not need to go the extra mile... … View Post »

Several weeks ago, Facebook announced the upcoming f8 08 Conference , which will be taking place on Wednesday, July 23rd in San Fransisco, CA... After opening registration about a week ago, Facebook has finally provided the list of sessions happening the day of the event, including topics and speakers for each... Introducing the New Facebook Profile & More In this session, you will learn everything you need to know about the new Facebook profile, Feeds and other changes to Facebook Platform, including new authorization and user permissions... Learn how to successfully modify your applications to take advantage of the new integration points... Learn how Facebook Connect can help you socialize and streamline your website using trusted authentication, real identity, friends access, and dynamic privacy... Hear directly from the Facebook Design team on how we think about design and user experience at Facebook and how you can apply this to your applications for a seamless integration... Building a Business on Facebook / Metrics & Analytics In this session you will learn everything about how to build a business on Facebook Platform and measure your success... We ll guide you through the tools that will help you optimize your distribution and share some best practices to increase the virality of your application... … View Post »

With all the pending updates to Facebook s profile design and the associated API calls that will be effected, it can be hard to follow for even the keenest developers... Fortunately, Justin over at Inside Facebook has put together a very helpful article entitled 5 Minute Tour of New Facebook Profile Integration Points ... … View Post »

This year s event will take place on Wednesday, July 23rd in San Fransisco, CA... Since the Facebook Platform s public announcement and launch on May 24th last year, the Platform is quoted as growing in the following ways... 400,000+ Developers in over 160+ Countries 24,000+ Applications in the Directory Over 95% of our 80 million active users have added at least 1 application to their profiles... To follow upcoming announcements regarding event details, check out the official f8 2008 page... You can even request what type of content you would like to see this year... … View Post »

Facebook announced last night the availability of LiveMessage, a new beta feature available to developers... Likely the result of much work put into Facebook s new chat feature, LiveMessage allows messages to be pushed from one user to another via AJAX... Unlike the typical HTTP pull structure in which the server sends data only when the client requests it, this change will give the appearance as being a push structure to the end users... The new LiveMessage wiki entry explains how easy the feature can be implemented... In order to receive messages, a callback handler must be set up in the following manner... // listen for messages sent with the "game_move" event name var livemessage = new LiveMessage( ' game_move ' , function(data) { // successfully received a message - "data" is a JSON object... … View Post »

Facebook officially released the fbOpen Platform , which is essentially the framework that runs Facebook Platform... According to the press release , the intention of the release is to help you as developers better understand Facebook Platform as a whole and more easily build applications, whether it s by running your own test servers, building tools, or optimizing your applications on this technology... That network deployment, or making modifications available over the network, counts as distribution, which makes the license appropriate for Web services... The platform can be downloaded on the official Facebook Open Platform page... … View Post »

Or have you ever considered selling realty on your about page for other complementing apps to purchase?... This simple feat can be done with Facebook s own Static FBML application!... First, within your application s about page, click the Edit Application link located near the top - right... Find the box labeled FBML, and click the Add FBML link within it... You ll then be presented with a simple 2 - input form... The first input allows you to enter a title for the box appearing on the profile... You might choose something that will attempt to grab the user s attention, such as More Fun Apps!... The second input is a multi - line text box, which is used to enter the contents of the body FBML that should be rendered within the box on the about page... You ll likely want to include an image of the application to provide visual stimulus to the user in hopes of converting them into users of these other apps... This can be done using an infinite number of approaches, but a general outline has been provided below to give you a head start... style div.app { border - bottom:1px solid #d8dfea;... padding - bottom:3px;... } / style div class="app" a href="http: / / apps.facebook.com / ad - libs /" img src="http: / / photos - a.ak.facebook.com / photos - ak - sctm / v43 / 52 / 7714537540 / app_2_7714537540_9111.gif" / / a div class="detail" div a href="http: / / apps.facebook.com / ad - libs /" Ad - Libs!... / div / div / div div class="app" a href="http: / / apps.facebook.com / favorite - games /" img src="http: / / photos - c.ak.facebook.com / photos - ak - sctm / v43 / 22 / 5739766474 / app_2_5739766474_1763.gif" / / a div class="detail" div a href="http: / / apps.facebook.com / favorite - games /" Favorite Games / a / div div Watch trailers & amp;... / div / div / div The resulting output can be seen below, with an example of how it appears in the wide column to the left, and an example of the narrow column to the right... While the above example does make use of application images stored on Facebook s servers, Facebook has recommended in the past that, because they may change their server configurations at any time thus resulting in changing URL s for images, applications should not directly reference these image URL s... One additional consideration is to add a reference to the querystring of your target URL s in order to track conversion success... In the above example, one of the URL s used is http: / / apps.facebook.com / ad - libs /... … View Post »

Invite forms are one of many opportunities available in the Facebook Platform that enable application growth... Because invitations are enacted by users ( as opposed to the application or Facebook itself ), friends receiving these invites are likely to view each invite request, providing them an opportunity to be converted into an application user as well... A Bit of Invite History Inviting friends has been a controversial spot amongst Facebook application developers... The act of inviting friends is not specifically what all the controversy is about;... In an attempt to create a multitude of application invitations in hopes of drawing many new users, numerous developers have made it mandatory for new users to invite a minimum number of friends to an application before the user can even interact with the application themselves... Clicking the Skip button on the invite form simply returned the user to the invite form once again until they either invited the minimum number of friends, or left the application altogether... Many did not realize ( and some still do not realize ) that this is not the way Facebook s invite form was intended to be used, and as a result, many applications found a large number of users by implementing this design... However, over time, it resulted in a backlash from much of the Facebook community, as such a design can generally be considered to result in a poor user experience... After many complaints in various forms including a Facebook group entitled No, I will NOT invite 20 friends just to add your application!... that garnered much attention Facebook has modified its platform policy such that forced invites are strictly forbidden from use... First, you must create an fb:request - form, which is processed in order to create an HTML form that is used to invite friends... Finally, at least one fb:req - choice is required... php / / Prepare the invitation text that all invited users will receive... " fb:multi - friend - selector max="20" actiontext="Here are your friends who haven ' t added Favorite Games to their profile... Invite them to share their Favorite Games today!" showborder="true" rows="5" / fb:request - form The above code creates the following output... And, once your user clicks the Send Invitation button, they ll be presented with a window similar to the following, which demonstrates how the invite request will appear when their friends receive it... In order to prevent this scenario, you can take advantage of the fb:multi - friend - selector s exclude_ids attribute... This attribute accepts a comma - delimited list of user ID s... To take advantage of this field, you ll need to capture the list of friends who have already added the application to their profiles... } } / / Convert the array of friends into a comma - delimeted string... … View Post »

The much anticipated MySpace Developer Platform has officially opened up, allowing third party developers to create custom applications for the most popular social network much like Facebook s Platform has permitted since last May... While many social networks have been launching development platforms in recent months, this launch will be considered especially important to many developers... On top of MySpace being the most popular social network, the site has also launched to all developers at the same time... Other social networks such as Facebook and Bebo first provided access to their platforms to the likes of Slide, RockYou, and similar development companies, giving them what many consider to have been an unfair advantage in the playing field... Although developers can begin creating and testing applications, MySpace s user base does not yet have access to applications... According to the official MySpace Developer Platform documentation, here s how the company defines an application and summarizes how it all works... A MySpace Application is any software the utilizes the MySpace Developer Platform ( MDP ) to access user data, perform actions, and to integrate this data and associated actions into MySpace pages... MDP supports the development of applications based on the OpenSocial model of acces to data and functionality on participating networks... Application Profile: the page where members come to learn about and install your application... ( Facebook Equivalient: Left Navigation Bar ) Applications Manager: allows users to view installed apps, change application settings, and uninstall applications... ( Facebook Equivalient: Application Privacy Page ) Profile Modules: display information, content and functionality generated by your application directly on a member s profile... ( Facebook Equivalent: Profile Box * ) Application monetization sounds very promising according to Mashable... In terms of monetization, the revenue share hinted at last week won t be available initially... Instead, developers will be able to control 100% of ads on their canvas page, where most of the main functions of applications will live... In the future, developers will be able to utilize the same tools currently being beta tested by MySpace, which allow advertisers to place hyper targeted ads based on users profile characteristics... * The MySpace Profile Module is only viewable to the profile owner... … View Post »