A question I get asked frequently is “How can you monetize with Google Adsense ads in a Facebook application?”
Anyone who has tried will find it is not as easy as it sounds. This is because Facebook plays about with Javascript code as it serves your pages up. This is a security thing on their part, but it also means that a lot of standard Javascript does not function as you’d expect.
But there is a fairly easy work-around…
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.
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…