Introduction
"'Facebook is a social utility that connects you with the people around you.'"
This article hopes to unravel some of the aspects of creating a Facebook application; promoting it and developing a good viral uptake. It also hopes to sway you in using Triangle Solutions Ltd to build your application for you!
Additionally it will help clients in understanding the terminology used with certain aspects of a Facebook application, for example the "About Page" is a Facebook driven page that promotes the application and accessible to users when they click on the application from the directory.
Facebook Applications, What Are They?
I think many people confuse the complexities of a Facebook application with the very popular MySpace widget. Although similarities can be drawn in terms of what the general public see on a user's profile, the mechanics behind both are very different. Facebook offers a rich platform of tools and API's to empower the developer to create content rich applications (though there is some debate as to whether these tools have been used to there full potential as yet).
Basically anything is possible inside the pages of your application; restrictions are only applied as to what can be output to your application profile box. The beauty of Facebook is that these inside pages can be commercially driven.
Facebook Application Anatomy
A Facebook application can be broken down into several distinct parts.
- About Page - The application owner has control over the description and optional use of an image to describe the application to potential users. The rest of this page is Facebook driven; including a discussion board and application wall. Please click on the Facebook About page thumbnail to the right.
- Left Navigation - Applications can have their icon and Application name added to the left hand Facebook navigation. This can link to any internal application page.
- Canvas Pages - Canvas pages are presented within the Facebook frame and can either be FBML or an external HTML site presented within an iframe. These pages are 100% hosted by the client and as such Facebook allows almost any type of monetization to happen within them.
- The canvas pages are the nuts and bolts of the application, allowing the user to perform actions such as adding a photo, inviting friends, commenting on an item etc. These actions can be geared in a way to enhance the viral nature of the application.
- Take the popular Vampires application, the user can bite their friends; so not only is this biting action reported in the user's news feeds, but also the action has initiated an invite to the bitten friend. So in one swoop the application has broadcast itself to potentially hundreds of users.
- Profile Box - The profile box is usually the place to show the most recently updated information or the most recent actions of the user. This information should reflect how the user would want to represent their identity through your application on their profile. Looking at Triangle's Love Football application the user simply chooses the team's they support and the application displays these on the Profile box, but again to enhance viral activity Triangle added in Discussion point links. External user's who view these profiles may be drawn to investigate and then hopefully convert into a user themselves.
- One thing to note about the profile is that it cannot be dynamically updated through database queries. The only way to update content that is tailored to each user is to PUSH the new content to every single user's profile box. If the content is static among every user then certain Facebook tools can be used to require only one push to update all.
- Profile Action Links
- Under a user's photo in their profile you can display a quick link to more info about that user's presence within your application. You can install these links even for users who haven't installed your application; have added your application (or, in the case of the profile of a user who has added your application, it will show up for all viewers).
- News Feed
- Applications can access News Feed and post stories to it. Each user has a maximum number of News Feed stories that they can see from all applications. Once that maximum is reached they will no longer see any more application stories during that sweep. For example, the Photos application publishes News Feed stories about photos your friends have uploaded recently.
- Requests / Invites
- Applications can create requests that show up at the top right of a user's homepage. These requests are usually initiated by a user's friend and often require the user to take some form of action. An example of this in the Photos application is a photo tag request confirmation.
- Message Attachments
- Applications can create attachments that appear in a drop down menu on the message composer. When the user selects that action, content is fetched and placed inside an attachment box below the message text in the composer.
- Alerts
- Applications can send notifications to a user through email. The user of the application who triggers this action must approve of the email, and users can opt out of receiving the email for any application that has ever sent them emails.
Marketing Your Application
Facebook has its own internal marketing application, Ads.
Embedding Flash
Facebook will pass through several parameters as FlashVars the important ones are as follows:
- allowScriptAccess => never // Always set
- wmode => transparent
- fb_sig_user => 668010822
- fb_sig_api_key => 26e1a9675cecc3408bb5f4a09a3ac790
- fb_sig_added => 1 or 0
- fb_sig_session_key => 198c49145e391389a53b7b9a-668010822
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