Today I launched my first facebook application called What I Learnt Today.
Thanks to a few tutorials, some google searches and a few late nights I managed to complete it within a week (and that’s while also working full-time during the day).
The application basically records what you learn everyday and displays this information on your profile eg. ‘Today Trevor learnt how to build a facebook application.’ You can also see what your friends have been recently learning.
I have learnt a lot in a short period of time and have also gained so much respect for the facebook team, everything seems to be so cleverly planned and so well executed… except perhaps their help docs.
Here are a few resources that helped me out…
A step by step guide to building a Facebook Application
A general overview and FAQ for creating a Facebook Application
How to successfully publish news and mini-feed stories
Converting PHP4 associative arrays into JSON format
During my readings and research I have learnt a few things and come to a few conclusions about getting your application noticed.
As a facebook application developer you probably want as many people as possible to add your application. For this to happen you will firstly need to create a ‘cool’ application, then you are going to need people to know your ‘cool’ application exists.
The most obvious way is through a friend invite page Fb:request-form
The other way is through news and mini-feed stories Feed.publishTemplatizedAction
You can pretty much guarantee that your event will get displayed in someones mini-feed (providing they haven’t disabled it). The tricky bit is getting your stories into the News Feed’s of people who don’t have your application installed.
Here are a few things you can do to improve your chances.
- Use the publishTemplatizedAction method- if you don’t use this method, people who don’t have your application installed will never hear from it.
- Create Feed Templates in the Developer Section that match exactly to your intended feeds.
- Don’t force users who click on the News Feed item to immediately add your application – facebook monitors users clicks and the longer a user moves around your application without needing to add it, the better. Also, try to avoid forcing a user to login, if you can.
- Make your ‘title_template’ and ‘body_template’ very general and leave the specifics for the ‘body_general’ copy (it will make more sense when you get to this stage). This will allow your stories to become aggregated which multiplies there chance of being displayed.
