building applications to grow your facebook empire

[...]... generations) It’s safe to say that Facebook offers an opportunity to distribute to a much larger audience much more quickly than virtually any other technology in history 4 | Chapter 1: Introducing Facebook Platform New opportunity This brings us to the bottom line: Deep Integration + Mass Distribution = New Opportunity Building applications on Facebook Platform gives you a chance to get your software in... architectures for Facebook apps, some solid recommendations for database performance, and an overview of the design and user experience of winning applications Chapter 5, Setting Up Your Environment Learn about all the things you need to download, how to add apps to Facebook, the secret trick to setting up a test account, and how to get the lowdown on the latest and greatest from Facebook Chapter 6, Facebook. .. continues * Facebook is a registered trademark of Facebook, Inc † f8 Keynote Address (http://www.new .facebook. com/f8) 1 Figure 1-1 Blog posts about Facebook Platform” since May 2007 to grow at the astounding rate of 200,000 new users per week Numbers like that tend to be somewhat difficult to understand—if all those people impossibly stood on each other’s shoulders, they’d reach 93,000 miles into the sky!... Pictures Linking to Events Linking to Groups Linking to Networks Display Content to Group Members Display Content to Network Members Displaying Content to App Users Displaying Content to Friends Displaying/Hiding Content to/ from Specific Users Displaying Random Content Displaying Content to Specific Browsers Displaying Your Application’s Name Formatting Relative Time Making Content Visible to Some Users... Notifications Get Pages Checking Page Properties Create a Photo Album Get Photo Albums Get Photos Uploading a Photo Adding Tags to Photos Getting and Setting Profile FBML Get a User’s Info Get Logged-In User Has a User Added My App? Setting Status Extended Permissions Checking Extended Permissions Storing Data with the Data Store API Granting Permissions to Other Applications Via the Permissions API 9.56 Post-Remove... chickens until they hatch Facebook Connect, launched in May 2008, takes the idea of Facebook Platform offFacebook one step further by enabling you to include Facebook- like features in your own site The topic is a little outside the reach of this book, but you can find more information on the Developers Wiki at http://wiki.developers .facebook. com/index.php/ Facebook_ Connect 1.4 Facebook Platform Versus... Deep integration Two of the most popular Facebook applications are Photos and Videos, both written by internal Facebook developers Your applications get the same level of integration as these do (known as application parity), and you have basically the same access to Platform Mass distribution Here’s where the network value comes into play Those of you old enough to remember television commercials from... can’t just use regular JavaScript in your app, how to build great Ajax-like interactions using Facebook s Mock Ajax techniques, and goes into detail about all of the handy functions available to you xx | Preface Chapter 8, Facebook Query Language (FQL) As FBML is to HTML, FQL is to SQL We’ll take a look at the schema of the various database tables you have access to, and catalog some really useful (and... and dig into some hard work The rest of this book will help to make that as easy as possible by telling you how to get set up quickly, providing practical advice on what to build and how to evaluate your idea, working through the technical side of Platform, and showing you some proven marketing techniques for your new application 1.2 Skills to Pay the Bills Now that you know a little about Facebook. .. familiarity with that language if you’re going to integrate directly with the 1.2 Skills to Pay the Bills | 5 Facebook API (as opposed to relying entirely on FBML) or with your own backend We’ll cover these topics largely in Chapters 6 and 7 Backend skills As you’ll see in the coming chapters, your application actually lives on your server, rather than being hosted by Facebook This gives you a huge amount of . diverse innovators together to nurture the ideas that spark revolutionary industries. We specialize in documenting the latest tools and systems, translating the inno- vator’s knowledge into useful. in on answers to time-critical questions in a matter of seconds. Read the books on your Bookshelf from cover to cover or sim- ply flip to the page you need. Try it today for free. Facebook Cookbook ™ Jay. Linking to Events 137 6.10 Linking to Groups 138 6.11 Linking to Networks 138 6.12 Display Content to Group Members 138 6.13 Display Content to Network Members 139 6.14 Displaying Content to App