<Developing a Facebook App>

One app away from glory

GRSC 7770Kapil Goenka

Nov 12, 2007

Agenda

• Why Facebook?

• Why develop an app ??

• Anatomy of a Facebook app

• Steps involved in creating an App

Why Facebook ?

• More than 53 million “active” users

• Active users doubling every 6 months

• Average of 250000 new registrations per day since Jan 2007

• More than 65 billion page views per month

Why develop an app ?

• The possibility of reaching out to so many users !

• More than 50% of active users return daily !

• Its simple & pretty cool.

Anatomy of a Facebook App

• Application Directory• About• Left Nav• Canvas Pages– Home

• Profile– Profile Box

• Privacy Settings• News feed• Requests

Application Directory

Many users may find your application by browsing the Facebook Application Directory.

This is where beautiful imagery and concise, descriptive text pay off.

About

The ‘about’ page tells users about the application and is accessed from the Facebook application directory.

It should inspire users to install the application.

Left Nav

Applications can have their icon and name added to the left hand Facebook navigation.

This will link to the application’s homepage.

App Home

An application's homepage is accessed from the Facebook Left Nav.

Ideally this homepage would aggregate friend data to create a page worth coming back to quite often.

For example, the photo homepage shows your friends' recently created albums.

Canvas Page

Facebook Canvas pages are presented within the Facebook frame and can be FBML or an external html site presented within an iframe.

Profile Box

The profile box is usually the place to show the most recently updated information or the most recent actions of the user.

This information should reflect how the user would want to represent their identity through your application on their profile.

News feed

Applications can access News Feed and post stories to it.

For example, the Twitter application publishes News Feed stories about the latest twitter updates from your friends.

Requests

Applications can create requests that show up at the top right of a user's homepage.

These requests are usually initiated by a user's friend and often require the user to take some form of action.

An example of this in the Photos application is a photo tag request confirmation.

Steps involved in creating an App

• Add the Facebook Developer Application

• Setup a new Application

• Fill out the details. • You will be given two keys once you’ve filled out the form

Need Hosting Space

The two keys that you got when you set up your application.

The URL where your app is hosted

Sample Hello World App

Resources• http://www.developer.facebook.com• F8 Keynote address by Mark Zuckerberg• Getting started with Facebook Application

development

• This presentation can be found online at http://kapilgoenka.com/facebookApps.pdf