Facebook App Basics

The Facebook Platform is an umbrella term used to describe the set of services, tools, and products provided by the social networking service Facebook for third-party developers to create their own applications and services that access data in Facebook.

The current Facebook Platform was launched in 2010. The platform offers a set of programming interfaces and tools which enable developers to integrate with the open “social graph” of personal relations and other things like songs, places, and Facebook pages. Applications on facebook.com, external websites, and devices are all allowed to access the graph.

History

Facebook launched the Facebook Platform on May 24, 2007, providing a framework for software developers to create applications that interact with core Facebook features. A markup language called Facebook Markup Language was introduced simultaneously; it is used to customize the “look and feel” of applications that developers create. Using the Platform, Facebook launched several new applications, including Gifts, allowing users to send virtual gifts to each other, Marketplace, allowing users to post free classified ads, Facebook events, giving users a method of informing their friends about upcoming events, Video, letting users share homemade videos with one another, and social network game, where users can use their connections to friends to help them advance in games they are playing. Many of the popular early social network games would combine capabilities. For instance, one of the early games to reach the top application spot, (Lil) Green Patch, combined virtual Gifts with Event notifications to friends and contributions to charities through Causes.

Third party companies provide application metrics, and several blogs arose in response to the clamor for Facebook applications. On July 4, 2007, Altura Ventures announced the “Altura 1 Facebook Investment Fund,” becoming the world’s first Facebook-only venture capital firm.

On August 29, 2007, Facebook changed the way in which the popularity of applications is measured, to give attention to the more engaging applications, following criticism that ranking applications only by the number of people who had installed the application was giving an advantage to the highly viral, yet useless applications. Tech blog Valleywag has criticized Facebook Applications, labeling them a “cornucopia of uselessness.” Others have called for limiting third-party applications so the Facebook user experience is not degraded.

Applications that have been created on the Platform include chess, which both allow users to play games with their friends. In such games, a user’s moves are saved on the website, allowing the next move to be made at any time rather than immediately after the previous move.

By November 3, 2007, seven thousand applications had been developed on the Facebook Platform, with another hundred created every day. By the second annual f8 developers conference on July 23, 2008, the number of applications had grown to 33,000, and the number of registered developers had exceeded 400,000.

Within a few months of launching the Facebook Platform, issues arose regarding “application spam”, which involves Facebook applications “spamming” users to request it be installed.

Facebook integration was announced for the Xbox 360 and Nintendo DSi on June 1, 2009 at E3. On November 18, 2009, Sony announced an integration with Facebook to deliver the first phase of a variety of new features to further connect and enhance the online social experiences of PlayStation 3. On February 2, 2010, Facebook announced the release of HipHop for PHP as an opensource project. Mark Zuckerberg said that his team from Facebook is developing a Facebook search engine. “Facebook is pretty well placed to respond to people’s questions. At some point, we will. We have a team that is working on it”, said Mark Zuckerberg. For him, the traditional search engines return too many results that do not necessarily respond to questions. “The search engines really need to evolve a set of answers: ‘I have a specific question, answer this question for me.'”

On June 10, 2014, Facebook announced Haxl, a Haskell library that simplified the access to remote data, such as databases or web-based services.

In Facebook, you create “apps” that run on “platforms”. As a quick, very simplified summary, the three primary types of “platforms” that apps can run are:

• A website that you host and control, but integrated with the Facebook Graph API (has Facebook Login, posting etc), but otherwise looks like a normal website. You host these on your own servers.
• A website designed to sit inside an iFrame on the Facebook Platform. These apps will also generally interact with Facebook Graph. You still host them on your own servers but you have the added advantage that but can get limited information about the user when the page loads.
• Stand alone programs (including mobile applications) that also interact with the Facebook Graph.

An “App” (Not to be confused with the similarly not-quite-a-full-application called an “Applet”) is not really an “application”. Applications or programs are roughly synonymous to each other as what software is called on a personal computer. They are installed from disk or downloaded, but either way, they actually get written onto your hard drive.

An Facebook App doesn’t. It’s a feature to a website that goes no further than your browser. So if you were using an App to play Scrabble with a friend on Facebook, each move you make is saved on Facebook’s servers, not the computers of you or your friend. And the page updates when you log in again or otherwise refresh your browser. This is the core of what makes something an “app”.

Facebook provide two ways to embed the application iFrame:

• one is a canvas app. This has minimal surrounds for Facebook Header, Footer and a few ads on the right. It maximises your space.
• the other is a “page tab”. This is smaller and designed to sit in a company’s “Facebook Page” so has less space. As a marketer, however, it keeps everything more branded to your company.

A single app can run across all the above – canvas, a page tab and a stand-alone HTML page. With some shifting of the API, you can also wrap the same code for mobile and put on the app stores. A user can log in on your mobile app and you can have them logged in on websites and vice-versa (within some limits, but you’ll need to explore those).

What is the Facebook Platform?

Facebook launched the Facebook Platform on May 24, 2007, providing a framework for software developers to create applications that interact with core Facebook features. User information can be shared from web communities to outside applications, delivering new functionality to the web community that shares its user data via an open API. An API is an application programming interface which is a specification intended to be used as an interface by software components to communicate with each other. In fact, the Facebook Application Platform is one of the best-known APIs. The Facebook Platform provides a set of APIs and tools, which enable third-party developers to integrate with the “open graph” — whether through applications on Facebook.com or external websites and devices.