Netodex

I spent almost five years living in the USA before returning to the UK.  While I was there I came across a guy by the name of Steve Humprey.  He is a programmer but he has this uncanny ability to be able to explain how to write and change code so that anyone can understand it.

If you are building monetized sites or you want to do your own Facebook apps then learning PHP is a very sensible step. 

But it looks so complicated doesn’t it?

It doesn’t have to be.  This is not B.S. and I highly recommend it…

Learn to use PHP in two hours.

I just wanted to show what else can easily be done using the death prediction application as a framework and in very little time.

This application http://apps.facebook.com/grannypoosticks is built using the exact same code.  All we have done is ignore the random number part which tells them how long they have to live, fill the random lines file with a collection of nutty things a mad old lady might say and replace the grim reeper image with one of a batty gran.  Finally set the app title, etc and the job is done.

Granny Poo Sticks

The whole thing took about 15 minutes.

The key here is that you can quickly create different applications that will appeal to other people (some will find the death app in bad taste for example but would love the humour of the granny app) and the wider audiences you pull in the more ad revenue you will make.

And don’t forget, our licences allow you to use the code to make as many apps as you want for your own use at no extra charge!

Download the Application framework we used for this from here

Some of the stream changes on Facebook come into effect next Tuesday. 

As Facebook announced on the developer blog on October 23rd (http://developers.facebook.com/news.php?blog=1&story=321), the way that stream stories are rendered is changing.  From Next Tuesday one action link will be shown, and only the first 25 characters of that action link.  Also formatting characters will be stripped out (things like  ”[“, “{” and “|”).

These are not massive changes but they will affect all existing applications and will change how their stories appear.

For more updates and details keep an eye on the Facebook Developer wiki.  Here is a link to the developer roadmap – http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/Developer_Roadmap

We’ve just concluded an interesting facebook application experiment. We took two simple apps that were both built on the same basic code. They picked a random phrase and output it along with a random number.

We made one application a “fortune cookie app” which gave the user a lucky number and an amusing and often nonsense phrase like you would find in a real fortune cookie.

The other was a much more morbid ‘how and when will I die?’ application which used the random number to tell the user how many years they had left to live and the random phrase became the predicted method of death.

We got two facebook users (members of our team) to spend 15 minutes a day promoting by joining groups and publishing feeds to their wall, etc. Both members had roughly the same number of friends on their lists, etc. To keep it even more fair they would swap apps each day so if one was slightly better at promoting that than the other it should all even out.

The results on the growth of the two apps was astonishing…

Read entire article.

As we reported a few days ago the way that Facebook feed stories work is changing to a new system.  The new system can be used right away, but the old system will be depreciated (in other words it will stop working) on 20th December 2009.

If you have looked into the new system of feed stories on Facebook it may have left you a little bemused. The example code they give is a little confusing and doesn’t quite work ‘as-is’.

After much experimenting, hitting my head against the proverbial wall and wading through page loads of posts on the developer forum from people who clearly were having similar problems, I came up with some code that works.

Let us look at this example first which requests extended permissions and then posts a feed to a users wall.  Extended permissions is the new feature where your application has to ask the user to grant permission to access or post to their wall, send them email, have offline access, send them email, etc.

The good news is that buried deep in the explanations on the Facebook developer site it turns out that there is still a way to simply pop up a request to post a feed to the users wall without the extended permissions but it is not accessible directly from the php library. However I will show you that code in a moment.

If you haven’t already you will need to download the latest facebook php libraries.  As always these are downloadable from

http://svn.facebook.com/svnroot/platform/clients/packages/facebook-platform.tar.gz

Here is my modified version of the code which I have turned into a demo that asks you for extended permissions and then posts a sample feed to your wall.  You will notice that I only ask for ‘publish stream’ permission since it is all my application needs.  I would strongly recommend that you only ask for what is necessary as users are already going to be a little wary of granting permissions so the fewer you ask for the more likely the user is going to accept.

Here is the code: (there is a downloadable zip file with all the code samples at the end of this article).

Read entire article.

Facebook announced today that they are changing the way that feeds work. The full facebook announcement can be read in their developer blog at Facebook Development Blog.

Here are the key points in English along with a few questions that the documentation doesn’t do a great job of explaining.

First of all there are now two views a user can have, one is a news feed which is basically posts that a facebook algorithm determines are the most interesting. Things like how many comments, how unique it is and how many people ‘like’ the post will play some part. In their words…

* News Feed will focus on popular content, determined by an algorithm based on interest in that story, including the number of times an item is liked or commented on.
* Live Feed will display all recent stories from a large number of a user’s friends.

OK, so far so good, except you can expect to lose some viral traffic where users only view the news feed and facebook has not flagged your feeds as worthy enough to make it.  However according to facebook if these are engaging and interesting then you have nothing to worry about.  Of course how interesting anyone can claim ‘Joe Bloggs has made it to level 5 in the big magic spoon game’ is purely subjective.

The biggest concern is that they are depreciating the template feed system by December 20th 2009.

Hundreds of thousands of applications out there all need to be changed in the next two months! And considering the documentation is hard to follow at best they are not making it easy for the little guys.  But do not fear! We can break it down into English for you. Read entire article.

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Thanks

Andy Brocklehurst