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Archive for the ‘Developer Facebook’ Category

Facebook applications are an innovation aimed to help their owners to make the most of one of the largest social networks. long term payday loans But like any other popular novelty, this Facebook option raises a lot of questions too.

In this article you will find tips and recommendations which can be helpful when planning, designing, and developing Facebook applications.

Facebook Development Platform – Innovations and… Volatility

Facebook is growing fast now. The number of Facebook users escalates in thousands and millions. It means that Facebook apps owners get increasingly more potential users every single day.

But this coin has a reverse side too: due to Facebook rapid evolution tools for the application development – Facebook API (Application Programming Interface), etc – are changed quite often as well. Owners, designers, and developers should keep track of such new features because they can affect appearance, functionality, and operability of existing applications.

1). So, before starting planning a Facebook application make sure you have read Facebook Privacy Policy and Facebook Developer Principles and Policies. These documents contain lists of limitations that should be taken into account while designing and developing your Facebook application. If your application does not correspond to them, the Facebook team may not approve it for using on Facebook.
2). Read Facebook Developers Roadmap to be aware of the upcoming changes and to forecast respective modifications of your application in advance.

Frankly, documents mentioned above are not bedside literature. If you outsource their reading and learning to programmers, just remember that there are some constraints and internal rules on Facebook which can change with time, and your FB application should follow them.

Successful Facebook Applications Start from Successful Design

Design is extremely important for Facebook application success. In order to provide good look and feel of your FB app take into account the following points.

1). Design should be an integral part of a general application concept and convey ideas and feelings behind it.
2). Design should be user-friendly, intuitive, and of playing style to some extent, because Facebook apps are entertaining by their nature. That extent depends on your application niche.
3). Design should be social-networking and viral – and give a user a supporting environment to socialize with other users. Does your design encourage people to communicate and make invitations? Does your design help people to express themselves and show them in a favorable light among their friends? Will users say each other “Wow, just take a look at that app!”?
4). Design may impose certain restrictions on a Facebook application and, therefore, cause problems when programming the app and afterwards when adding new functional features. As a result, a FB application design should be flexible and simple enough to be able to reflect that constant Facebook growth we’ve discussed above.
5). Also remember that potential users are spoilt by numerous already existing applications competing for their attention. So, analyze your competition to understand what and why is popular and how it can be overcome.

Facebook Apps vs. Facebook Connect – What Is the Difference From a Development Viewpoint?

Basic-level components of Facebook Connect are scripts which help to realize such options as sharing a piece of content or a link from your website onto Facebook, driving fans to your Facebook Page, etc. Such scripts are ready-to-use and easy-to-install onto a website.

Unlike it Facebook apps are software applications which are developed from scratch using Facebook Development Platform (Facebook API), as well as PHP, AJAX, MySQL, and other programming languages, libraries, and so forth. No wonder Facebook applications development and integration require designers, programmers, testers to be involved, and it is very similar to the creation of any other piece of conventional software. This is also true for Advanced Facebook Connect options and their tuning.

Facebook applications should not be confused with ordinary websites too. Usually FB apps are complex web-based systems with a lot of back-end (server-side) modules which, actually, provide app functionality and make the application attractive for users.

Facebook applications and Facebook Connect are all the rage now. What your FB app will be – just an attempt to follow the fashion or an effective tool to make the most of Facebook – depends on many factors. The deeper you learn and understand them, the better your result will be.

Most people would agree that Facebook business page has become the next social media network goldmine for business both small and large. And even the businesses that did not fully understand Facebook are now beginning to take a closer look.

But you might be wondering how can a Facebook business page help your unique business. And though that might be a valid question, you have to understand that every business need one that to survive and that is customers.

Facebook has allowed their uses to use the power of applications to really make a name for themselves. The application of Facebook is so powerful in that it allows the developers to be able to control the application and at the same time promote their website and bring more Facebook traffic to your offers.

Facebook is the biggest social media network with members of over 100 million. That is a lot of members and that number keeps increasing by the minute.

So it really is in the best interest of its users to take advantage of the application to build their business. Some business both large and small has used the power of Facebook traffic to build their business and have received some rather startling results.

What makes the Facebook business page so unique and powerful is that it allows its members to post their content on their walls. And they give you full control over the way your content will be viewed.

Using the power of the Facebook traffic to get to your website is really just about getting people to become your friend. All you do is to do a search on your keyword for your business. Then you find people who have an interest in that keyword.

Once you have found those people, you will get a button that ask if you want those people to become your friend. You will go ahead and request them to be your friend. That is the awesome power of social media network.

Once you have those people as your friends, you will go out and join groups. The reason why you want to join groups is that you want to hone in on the Facebook traffic of the owner of the group. The owner of the group would have spent time trying to get a large list of friends.

All you want to do is to post your content on their wall. Once you do that, then your content become viral because it will be shown on all the members of the group wall, this will bring you tons of free Facebook traffic.

Then you will build a Facebook business page so that you can have people coming to your fan page and liking your content. But your fan page must be linked to a website or blog that also has good content that is relevant to your audience.

Understanding the value of a Facebook business page and how it can help you propel your social media network strategies is very important.

The Facebook Platform has created a whole new market for online games and start ups such as the Social Games Network (SGN) and Zynga. I wrote about developing Facebook Applications a while ago as a overview of my experiences. Some of my apps are games and some are not – I’m a game developer so I prefer making games.

While going through my blog traffic data, I saw search terms specifically about developing games on Facebook. That leads me to believe that someone is looking for information about that. I have some of that knowledge to share!

I generally make games for Facebook using Flash and ActionScript. There really isn’t a good way to make really interactive games using web languages and Flash is fairly powerful for 2D casual game experiences. You can find a list of the Facebook games that I’ve made or had a hand in from my developing Facebook Applications article.

There are basically three real games on that list: FlipCup Challenge, Sam’s Solitaire, and Sheep Tycoon. Sheep Tycoon is by far the prettiest because there was a real artist on that project – the other two I just slapped some art together to get the game out quickly. I’m not really an artist.

Using Facebook API From Flash

Figuring out how to best make calls to the Facebook API from Flash was one of the first things we had to deal with. In Sheep Tycoon, the high score table shows up in the Flash part of the game opposed to FlipCup or Sam’s Solitaire where I just did it in PHP. There are a whole bunch of Flash Facebook API’s – I didn’t like any of them.

The solution we came up with is to make a 0×0 iframe – basically invisible – on the canvas page and load a PHP script that would do all the Facebook API calls. So, if we needed to add a new high score to our database, we would load the script in the invisible iframe. This works for sending notifications or doing any sort of Facebook API call.

Getting the Friends

Although I didn’t find doing this all that complicated, I did see a search term for it in my traffic data. The easiest way to accomplish this is to just get the user’s friend ID’s in PHP and then passing it into the game using flashvars. I don’t see many cases where the user’s friend list will change while the game is being played. Once you have the friend ID’s in the game you can do whatever you want with it. We used it to show the list of your friend’s high scores in Sheep Tycoon.

The game takes the friend ID’s from flashvars. When we need to get the high scores, we pass the same ID’s to our PHP script that does all the database work and then returns the data in XML form for Flash to read.

Dealing with High Scores

You can display the high scores inside the game or you can display as a PHP page. I will generally opt to do the latter because there are less steps involved. PHP will get the data and display the data while Flash has to call a PHP script to get the data and then display it. However, displaying the high scores as part of the game itself is a better experience.

The semi-tricky aspects with high scores is how to record them and assign global ranks to each player. I’ve used time as a tie-breaker for scores that are identical. If you got the score first, you will stay above the person who got the score second. MySQL has been our database of choice and you can use ORDER BY with more than one field so it would be: ORDER BY score, time.

In FlipCup Challenge, each user has a global rank that is determined by their high score. This rank changes as players get new high scores. Updating everyone’s global rank every time someone managed to get a new high score didn’t seem like a good idea.

Firstly, to calculate the global rank, I figured out the number of rows that had a score higher than the score we are looking to get a new rank for. With that information, we’ll know that the rank will be something lower than the row count. We then find all the scores that are the same as the score we are using and then determine where it fits in there. With those two pieces of information we can calculate the right rank.

In order to make sure the scores are correct when anyone goes to look at the Scoreboard in FlipCup, we also update the ranks of all your friends when your rank changes. Global ranks are also recalculated every time you view the Scoreboard page. This will ensure that all the global ranks will be correct when someone is viewing it.

I’m sure there are better ways for determining global ranks than this but, for FlipCup’s purposes, it works fine. The main objective was to make sure the pages loaded fast so the code had to do the work quickly.

Experiment

Game development on Facebook is still in infancy. I’m not aware of many sites dedicated to providing information about games and Facebook. The games themselves are still rather primitive as most don’t really tap into the potential of social networks. I believe social networks are a powerful tool that can help spread new games and game ideas.

I have not looked much into development on the “new” Facebook even though I have switched to it and my links above point to the new Facebook. My apps are still working fine so I am not too concerned. The marketing and growth of apps are going to be affected. The chance of a Zombies-esque app proliferating is very unlikely in this new environment.

I will continue to create games for Facebook and other social networks. There are some ideas I have floating around – some of which I am working on. Experimenting with different ideas is the best any of us can do as this is a new road to travel.