Facebook App Components

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There are many platform components and all are listed below.

Graph API

The Graph API is the core of Facebook Platform, enabling developers to read from and write data into Facebook. The Graph API presents a simple, consistent view of the Facebook social graph, uniformly representing objects in the graph (e.g., people, photos, events, and pages) and the connections between them (e.g., friend relationships, shared content, and photo tags).

Authentication

Facebook authentication enables developers’ applications to interact with the Graph API on behalf of Facebook users, and it provides a single-sign on mechanism across web, mobile, and desktop apps.

Social plugins

Social plugins – including the Like Button, Recommendations, and Activity Feed – enable developers to provide social experiences to their users with just a few lines of HTML. All social plugins are extensions of Facebook and are specifically designed so no user data is shared with the sites on which they appear.

Open Graph protocol

The Open Graph protocol enables developers to integrate their pages into Facebook’s global mapping/tracking tool Social Graph. These pages gain the functionality of other graph objects including profile links and stream updates for connected users. OpenGraph tags in HTML5 might look like this:

<meta property=”og:title” content=”Example title of article”>

<meta property=”og:site_name” content=”example.com website”>

<meta property=”og:type” content=”article”>

<meta property=”og:url” content=”http://example.com/example-title-of-article”>

<meta property=”og:image” content=”http://example.com/article_thumbnail.jpg”>

<meta property=”og:image” content=”http://example.com/website_logo.png”>

<meta property=”og:description” content=”This example article is an example of OpenGraph protocol.”>

iframes

Facebook uses iframes to allow third-party developers to create applications that are hosted separately from Facebook, but operate within a Facebook session and are accessed through a user’s profile. Since iframes essentially nest independent websites within a Facebook session, their content is distinct from Facebook formatting.

Facebook originally used ‘Facebook Markup Language (FBML)’ to allow Facebook Application developers to customize the “look and feel” of their applications, to a limited extent. FBML is a specification of how to encode content so that Facebook’s servers can read and publish it, which is needed in the Facebook-specific feed so that Facebook’s system can properly parse content and publish it as specified. FBML set by any application is cached by Facebook until a subsequent API call replaces it. Facebook also offers a specialized Facebook JavaScript (FBJS) library.

Facebook stopped accepting new FBML applications on March 18, 2011, but continued to support existing FBML tabs and applications. Since January 1, 2012 FBML was no longer supported, and FBML no longer functioned as of June 1, 2012.[citation needed]

Facebook Connect

Facebook Connect, also called Log in with Facebook, like OpenID, is a set of authentication APIs from Facebook that developers can use to help their users connect and share with such users’ Facebook friends (on and off Facebook) and increase engagement for their website or application. When so used, Facebook members can log on to third-party websites, applications, mobile devices and gaming systems with their Facebook identity and, while logged in, can connect with friends via these media and post information and updates to their Facebook profile.

Originally unveiled during Facebook’s developer conference, F8, in July 2008, Log in with Facebook became generally available in December 2008. According to an article from The New York Times, “Some say the services are representative of surprising new thinking in Silicon Valley. Instead of trying to hoard information about their users, the Internet companies (including Facebook, Google, MySpace and Twitter) all share at least some of that data so people do not have to enter the same identifying information again and again on different sites.”

Log in with Facebook cannot be used by users in locations that cannot access Facebook, even if the third-party site is otherwise accessible from that location.

According to Facebook, users who logged into The Huffington Post with Facebook spent more time on the site than the average user.

Microformats

In February 2011, Facebook began to use the hCalendar microformat to mark up events, and the hCard for the events’ venues, enabling the extraction of details to users’ own calendar or mapping applications.

Mobile platform

The UI framework for the mobile website is based on Xhp, the Javelin Javascript library, and WURFL. The mobile platform has grown dramatically in popularity since its launch. In December 2012, the number of users signing into the site from mobile devices exceeded web-based logins for the first time.