Whether you are a socialite or socially awkward, you
are ready to dive into creating "social networking"
applications for Facebook. Get the scoop in Part I, where
I introduce you to Facebook and its developer platform. I
then explore the social graph, Facebook's social network.
Finally, you roll up your sleeves and code your first
Facebook app.
We hear all of the time about "platforms" in various walks of life. Political parties put their policies and agendas into documents called platforms. An Olympic diver performs a perfect dive off of a 10 meter platform on the way to a gold medal. Heck, platform tennis is a form of tennis that people play with paddles.
Facebook too has its own platform - cleverly called the Facebook Platform. Fortunately for your coworkers, it is a platform that you don't need a swimsuit or a paddle to use. You do need to know a Web programming language such as PHP or Java, however.
Facebook gained popularity because of its structured environment and social network, but its Facebook Platform is proving to be a critical means of preventing it from becoming the latest "flavor of the month." Because of third-party applications, Facebook now offers a compelling reason for users to invest themselves in Facebook.com in a way that they were never really able to do with social networking sites like MySpace. In fact, upon the Platform's release, it was only a matter of weeks before users began to see thousands and thousands of Facebook-inspired applications from all sorts of developers - from major corporations to hobbyists working in their basements.
In this chapter, I introduce you to the basics of Facebook and its development platform. If you are an application developer just coming to this social networking site as a newcomer, I get you up to speed by surveying the core concepts and components of Facebook itself. Next, I survey the Facebook Platform and its various parts and show you how they work together to form a cohesive solution.
Discovering Facebook
MySpace and Friendster may have been the early "go to" places for online
social interaction, but Facebook has overtaken them as the fastest growing social networking site on the Web. Its structured environment, enjoyable user experience, and expandable platform for third-party applications have helped it gain this level of importance and popularity.
Before you begin to develop applications for Facebook, you should get to
know all of the ins and outs of Facebook itself to ensure you fully understand the potential of how your application can tap into its platform. If you are a newcomer to Facebook, you need to get your arms around two important concepts: the News Feed and the profile.
News Feed
After you are logged in to Facebook, the Facebook home page (www.facebook.com) displays the News Feed, as shown in Figure 1-1. Think of the News Feed as your own personalized news channel - something like a FNN (Friends News Network), if you want to get clever. The News Feed contains a live list of announcements or stories about the activity of your network of friends on Facebook - whom they befriended, what apps they added, what their Status is. For example, if my friend Paijo became friends with Zaragosha, I would receive the following story:
Paijo and Zaragosha are now friends.
Facebook compiles this list of news stories based on several factors - the activity of your friends, your preferences of story types, frequency settings on specific friends, the privacy levels of your friends, a user's opinion on the quality of a story (known as "thumbs up" and "x" votes) - all mixed together into a behind-the-scenes, super-secret algorithm. A user can determine the frequency of certain news stories, but Facebook ultimately retains control over what is placed on the News Feed. Facebook also places social ads inside of the News Feed. In this book, you discover how your application can add news stories to the News Feed. (Next Session)
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