Archive for June, 2008

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.

This article provides an excellent overview of how profile tabs will be laid out, what type of application data will appear in what tabs, profile column layouts, and more. Hopefully this article will help to ease overwhelmed developers whose applications will be affected by these changes.

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Facebook just announced the second annual f8 conference. 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.

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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.
});

Sending a message is equally easy to implement.

var livemessage = new LiveMessage('game_move');
var data = { from : from_uid, msg : message_text };
livemessage.send(recipient_uid, data);

Given that each LiveMessage is set up with an event name (”game_move” in the above example), it seems that setting up multiple message types would be easy to achieve, simply by providing a separate event name for each.

Clearly, such a unique addition to the Facebook Platform could result in a wave of new types of applications previously unthought of or simply impractical given the technology available.

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Facebook officially released the fbOpen Platform, which is essentially the framework that runs Facebook Platform. Included is the API infrastructure, the FQL, FBML, and FBJS parsers, and implementations of many common methods and tags. 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.”

With the exception of the FBML parser, Facebook Open Platform is licensed under a Common Public Attribution License (CPAL), which follows the Mozilla Public License (MPL) with the following two additions.

1. That you include attribution to Facebook on any modifications.
2. 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.

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