expertria.com

Today, Facebook announced that they will be shifting the Application Bar to the bottom left corner of the page, together with the chat bar.

So I was happily coding halfway today, when the Application Bar on the top disappeared and I was thinking it is due to me not drinking enough coffee. Then bang, it appear on the bottom on the second look

For those who do not know what Application Bar it, it consist of all your applications on Facebook, including Events, Photos, Videos and the other application you have installed. Previously, it can be access as a drop down list on the top. The new bar also means that bookmarked applications will now be visible always in the bottom.

Does the new Facebook profile really sucks ?

I started doing Facebook application development before the New Profile and things are pretty simple. 1 cached FBML for the profile page and the rest of the application is pretty much up to your own creativity. With the New Profile, you can have your application in the main Wall, OR it can be under Boxes, AND it COULD be under Application Tabs.

For end users, most of the first reaction from people I met is “It sucks”.  In fact, that is my first reaction too. Plus, designers will curse and swear too since now they have to design 2 more UI for Boxes and Application Tab. However, that also means that every Application gets the chances to have more exposure. Having a user putting your application to his / her application tab will be like winning a lottery, that means they love your application. You can now design a wide FBML  for Boxes Tab, and also a narrow FBML for Wall Tab, in which both can have radically different design, at the discreet of the developer.

Another tread we will see if that developers will now focus more on User’s stories to have their application noticed. Unless a user place their application under Wall Tab, it is unlikely that their friends will go the Boxes Tab to see “what application their friends have”. By focusing on User’s Stories, they will have information of their application to appear under the users’ Feeds, which is right on top on the user profile page. Applications not doing that yet will have to do that, to keep their applications competitive.

On the overall, while during the transition period, many might throw curses at Facebook New Profile design, I believe they will come to like it as they get used to it. Afterall, we get a less cluttered profile page now.

Introduction
For many Flex/Flash developers developing Facebook applications, development maybe daunting at first without a very detailed documentations, sample codes and blogs posting around to help. Most of time, many cannot grasp the general architecture of creating a Facebook application. While I am no expert in Facebook application development, I have picked up some useful tips and tricks along the way and I hope to share it around. Do take note the date of this posting. Facebook platform changes from time to time so 6 months down the road, this post might be obsolete.

Note that when I speak about Facebook development, it means having your Flash/Flex content inside Facebook profile and its canvas page. I do not mean connecting to Facebook using Actionscript. If you are looking to communicate with Facebook using Actionscript, please refer to this AS3 Facebook Library:
http://code.google.com/p/facebook-actionscript-api/

The Basic
Before you get started, I will suggest reading this blog posting by padraenl, titled 10 Things That Would Have Been Nice to Know When Starting My Facebook Application. Facebook Platform native documentation is good for referencing, but there isn’t instructions to teach new developers the “standard way” of approaching problems. This blog post answers to many common questions a developer will have.

How it works:
To understand how Facebook Applications work is very simple. Facebook does not provide you with any hosting service. You host your own application on your own server, and tell Facebook where to retrieve it. You churn out your own HTML / FBML / Javascript codes and Facebook parse it on its server, as simple as that. Essentially, you can develop in any language you like, as long as your codes render out the proper HTML / FBML / Javascript.

Things to note is that some of the examples you found on Facebook currently might be obsolete as Facebook now has a New Profile Design. To understand the new profile, you can read it’s documentation, or just scroll down to check the few screen shots I placed below:

New Profile

Instead of a one page profile now, there is now “Wall”, “Boxes”, and Application Tab. Therefore, you will need to plan at least 3 screens for your application.

Main Profile - Wall:

This is mostly visited page from the user’s friends. You have the real estate of a small column on the left hand side of the page. If you are using a Flash movie, it will only play after the user has clicked on a preview image due to Facebook restriction. This part is cached by Facebook and will refresh by using setFBML or the more scalable method fb:ref tag and fbml_refreshRefUrl method. I strongly recommend fbml_refreshRelUrl method. You can learn more about fb:ref here and view the code example here: http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/FBML_Dynamic_Setup.

Boxes

Boxes is the part where your application will be. Note that your application can EITHER be inside WALL or BOXES tab, and this is controlled by the user. (See the next Screenshot, where under the Video application, the user can choose to “Move to Wall Tab” or “Remove Box”). Also note that you can choose the left column (wide) or the right column (narrow) under your application settings.

Under Boxes tab, your Flash file will NOT show until the user clicks on a preview image.

All the Boxes content are cached and is refreshed by setFMBL or the more scalable method fb:ref tag and fbml_refreshRefUrl method.

Application Tab

This is the best privilege your application can have. A user loves your application so much that he/ she adds it to an application tab. In this case, your application has all the real estate of the entire page, and you can have a very customized UI / information like the below screenshot (Animoto application)

Note that this page is NOT cached by Facebook. So any content is taken directly from a URL you specified in the application settings. For example, you can set Facebook to take from http://expertria.com/myapp/profiletab.php. Facebook will load the page and display any HTML it loads from your server inside the Application Tab.

This also means you need to prepare your server for the load as this is no longer cached by Facebook. Also, if your server is slow is responding, Facebook will consider it as a timeout.

The Main Application.

This is the main application, outside the profile page. This is the part where user who have granted the application permission will see. Typically, it is under a url like http://apps.facebook.com/yourappname/yourapppageurl.

For example, if you set the base url of your application as http://expertria.com/myapp/. A page on Facebook “http://apps.facebook.com/appname/viewallmyfriends.php will be retreivng information from http://expertria.com/myapp/viewallmyfriends.php

You can have as many pages in your application as you want, as well as useful features like URL-rewriting for neater URL address, etc. Facebook does not care as long as they get a http 200 response for the page it request and the response contain valid HTML / FMBL, and that the response is not empty.

PHP development
You can develop Facebook application in any language on your server, but PHP has more code samples and examples around. I will chose PHP as the development language just for the reason of support. Note that as of the writing of this article, if you download the PHP library from Facebook developers site, you will get the old library (which does not has the full feature set for the New Profile Design).

To get the latest one, please download from their SVN:
http://svn.facebook.com/svnroot/platform/clients/php/branches/redesign-changes/

Where to keep my data
As mentioned, Facebook does not care what you do on your server, as long as your server response with valid HTML / FBML. Therefore, you can have data persistence in your own mySQL, or any database you want.

However, I will recommend using Facebook Datastore for a few reason. Firstly, you will not need to maintain another database. Secondly, you can do FQL to achieve something like  “Get those users who had installed this application,w ho are also the current user’s friends, who also are tagged in my application” , in a very direct  manner. Thirdly, there is a test console to help you test your FQL (Facebook Query Language).

Essentially, Facebook Datastore consist of Objects (like Tables) and Associations (like Foreign Key). I strongly suggestion anyone who is new to Facebook Datastore to check out this blog here [
Introduction to the Facebook Data Store API ->http://www.dereksantos.ca/?p=23]. It has far better explanation than Facebook documentation, and anyone with RDBMS knowledge will strike a chore instantly by reading the article.

Using FMBL and Javascripts
Learn FBML and Facebook’s Javascript FBJS before building your application! While many HTML tags are supported in Facebook, you cannot use an Object tag to render your swf directly in Facebook. You will need to use <fb:swf> tag. Using FBML will also gives you a consistent look to your application, so that it will looks like Facebook native application. For example, there is no need to build a custom tab as there is fb:tab. There is also no need to create a blue button that imitate facebook buttons as you can always use Facebook’s css class=”inputbutton” to change the style of your button to match Facebook’s.

As for Javascript , there are also restriction to Javascript. For example, there is no innerHTML to get the content of your HTML. Thus, you will need to learn how FBJS works on Facebook. You will also need FBJS to communicate between your SWF and the main Facebook page.

Flash FBML
Refer to this page to see how to embed Flash in Facebook page. The documentation is complete
http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/Fb:swf

Essential you need to use Fb:swf to render your swf file.

Flash - JS Bridge
The <fb:fbjs-bridge/>  is essential for your SWF to communicate with the Javascript on your HTML page. It works like External Inteface basically. How it works is that it creates another SWF on Facebook page and your SWF communicates to it via LocalConnection. The bridge will then use External Interface to communicate to the Facebook page on your behalf.

Refer to this documenation for code samples: http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/Fb:fbjs_bridge

Also, check out this library to call / receive functions in AS3

Creating Flash in Javascript
There are two ways to create a SWF dynamically using Javascript. One way is to use a fb:js-string, which is a pre-setted FBML, initially invisible, and then use document.getElementById(’name of div to insert’).setInnerFBML(myjstringname) to show it on the page.

An fb:js-string example:
<fb:js-string var=”myjsstringname”>
<fb:fbjs-bridge/>
<fb:swf swfbgcolor=”333333″ imgstyle=”border-width:3px; border-color:white;” swfsrc=”http://expertria.com/swf/fb.swf”   width=”300″ height=”280″   />
</fb:js-string>
Another way is to use document.createElement(”fb:swf”), which will dynamically create a new SWF object. You can then set its swfsrc , width and height using the below code:

var swf = document.createElement(’fb:swf’);
swf.setId(’my_swf_id’);
swf.setWidth(’100′);
swf.setHeight(’100′);
swf.setSWFSrc(’FULL_URL_TO_MY_SWF’);
document.getElementById(’swfContainer’).appendChild(swf);

Summary
I hope the above article helps developers with Flex/Flash background in having a better understanding on Facebook Application. Feel free to drop any tips you have under the comments. There are a few things like Mock AJAX and AJAX javascript which I did not cover, but the above should be sufficient to get someone started.

Keep coding!

Earlier this year before I join my current job at Seesmic, me and my co-workers are brainstorming ideas for the next web 2.0 trend. One of my belief then is “regardless of how the roadmap might be, we will need to have an equivalent Facebook application”

Over the past two weeks, I have been researching into the Facebook API extensively, covering each little pieces of FBML, reading hacks, standards, rants, and trying to keep my sanity together debugging Facebook applications. One thing is for certain, that is, for almost every reputable Web 2.0 service we see out there, they bound to have a Facebook equivalent. FriendFeed has it, Animoto has it, Viddler has it, Flickr has it. So, has this trend become an unwritten law in the world of Web 2.0? Is it vital for a website now to have a Facebook app. in order to succeed?

Viral, Viral , Viral!
We cannot deny that Facebook has a strong platform, good users base, and a very neat and consistent UI. While many developers will complain about its documentation, one thing we can say is that “it is working”, and that it has taken many work out for developers, including data storage on the data side, and a consistent CSS on the design side. Its simple and straightforward model gives companies and its developers the flexibility to develop their application in any language (although some has the misconception that it can be only be done in PHP). All is need will be to get the developers familiar with the Platform, take and modify existing line of product you already have, and Bang!, you got yourself a shiny facebook application, with 100 million of users possible of installing your application .

The viral nature of Facebook application means that you can easy get tons of users using your application. The presence of your services can be rapidly spread among friends of friends and by the time you realize, you might have more users on facebook than your actual application.

Planning a Facebook application in the brainstorming process
So the key question now is, do entrepreneurs and startups have Facebook in their radar even during the  brainstorming process? Is it a priority 1 thing to do , something that a company, should be doing immediately right after they launch their product. Do it gives a company an edge our its competitor, and does a lack of presence on Facebook a boo-boo and an embarrassment?
Facebook users vs your application users.
Segregation of users is 1 important trend I belive all startups should consider when building Facebook application. Does every 1 user on your Facebook application equivalent to a user in your actual application? Or is it just another service under the umbrella of services your company is building?

Services like FriendFeed map each of its Facebook application user to its real service. Meaning, for every Facebook user that installed the FriendFeed Facebook application has a FriendFeed account. Most of the time, a FriendFeed user do not even need to go into his FriendFeed Facebook application, as what he interact with Friendfeed goes automatic to the facebook equivalent. In this case, the viral nature of Facebook value-add back to the original application as for each installed user they have on Facebook, they also get one in their application.

Services like Superpoke, developed by Slide.com, on the other hand, has no direct relation to the content on Slide.com. Unlike Friendfeed, what you create on Slide does not goes to be part of a superpoke automatically, neither is it logical to be so. On the other hand, applications like Superpoke is much more viral, but I doubt each user of Superpoke will have a Slide.com account.

Neither approach is more superior than the other, and both has its own benefits and business model.

Coming back to my belief, I personally believe that having facebook application for any startup is essential. Not just to be viral, but also to show to your users that you are serious in building the product.

What do you think?