Facebook continued

Well the application is out there. It's an Advent Calendar for facebook and can be found here (you will be asked to login if you are not already). Obvioulsy by it's nature, it doesn't do anything until December 1st, so please be patient!

But this app was a test really, and it has raised further things that I will do next time, such as store every facebook ID when someone installs the app (and remove them when they remove the app) so that I have a proper count of users. This time, I will only be storing the ID if and when they actually open their advent calendar.

It's been interesting to see the burst in activity and installs when the app hit the Facebook directory. Of course, now there are a few more advent calendars, but that's to be expected. It'ss be interesting to see what activity levels do on December 1st when people start opening their calendars.

The other amazing thing is just how broad Facebook is. We don't store the information, but we blip it past on a staus screen that monitors server activity (with a nice jingle bell sound of course!). We've got installs ALL over the world! Quite amazing, and changes some of our affiliate plans considerably...

Anyway, roll on December 1st...

Facebook application day 2

Well in between other tasks today I've finally got my Facebook app complete and working on a public facing server that Facebook can see. Well, I think it's working. I'm recruiting 3 or 4 friends to help test it first, but it's out there if anyone stumbles upon it.

The main problems have been to do with the Facebook caching model. I understand why they need to do it, but it's a bit of a nightmare to deal with at times. Eg. If you are going to post anything, such as an image, to the user's Facebook profile, then Facebook will cache the image (so that they don't serve up broken images). This means if you ever change the image, you need to get Facebook to recache it, or use a different filename. All possible, but another hoop to jump through.

One thing that I did get working is the ability to invite friends to use the application. This makes use of Facebook's standard page to handle these requests - "multi_friend_selector.php", so a little bit of code to pass the correct parameters in, and Facebook does the rest.

Facebook - Anti Social Ads

There's been a lot of talk about Facebook's new ad platform for "Social Ads". Well they've gone live and killed my ad campaign which was working fine! The Flyers Pro which were the previous PPC adverts on Facebook have been tarred for low CTR, well I had managed to create a set of adverts which were getting 4-8 times the CTR of usual adverts. This was great and allowed me to drop the CPC down to 8p or so. Bargain. And because they had such a good CTR, they got preference over other things and appeared to run almost immediately.

Well, the new system looks like it will be better, but the change in system means my CTR history is, well, history. And the format is slightly different, so I can't replicate what I did before. And there is less text allowable. And, and, and.

So they killed (my) ad campaigns :-( The new system seems to just not get any click through at all (or minimal) and I have no idea where they are being displayed. Net result = my leads go down and Facebook ad revenue goes down. I assume other advertisers are going to see the same.

Now. Just need to figure out how to get the new platform working in my favour!

Facebook part 2

Well, the development is going OK so far. If Facebook didn't keep throwing "An existing connection was forcibly closed by the remote host" errors at me for no apparent reason, it might go even better. I asusme that the sandbox servers are overloaded, as it works for a bit then stops.

Basically I have the structure in place, so I have:

• Section of FBML that displays on my profile page
• This clicks through to the main page which gives a kind of status
• Items on this page then click through to a more dteailed page which updates the database and the FBML section.

Nice. I've still got lots of bits to do on it, and even more graphics to purchase (iStockPhoto we love you!) or make myself (How can PaintShop Pro be better than PhotoShop for some small bits? I don't know, but it is!)

But I'm quite pleased with how that's gone so far. I can already just about see the finished item, ready for submission to the directory and hopefully MASSIVE takeup by the FaceBook community. A man can dream!

Facebook Application development

I dabbled briefly in making Facebook application a few months ago, but never really pushed it due to other commitments. What with recent new stories going on about how popular some Facebook apps get, and how much they can be sold for (!), I thought I'd give it another try.

My dev platform is .Net 2.0 with C# and SQL Server to back it up, all hosted on Windows 2003.

My idea is kind of time critical, so I need to start working on it now (well, after XP has installed it's latest updates and rebooted...)

Things I need to think about is how integrated into profiles is the app going to be? Is it just going to sit there, or should it add message to the user's news feed? Should it be shareable, and therefore send messages to friends? I need to think it through...

Anyway. We start here on 6th November with nothing written. No concrete plans, no installed users. Nothing. Except we have reserved a Facebook application name and got an API key to use.

Let's see if (a) I get the time to dedicate to this to get something up and running (b) and how many installed users we get before the end of the year if I get it done in time! :-)