Hope everyone survived the first week of 2012 unscathed. Just wanted to announce that we helped the Detroit Red Wings and the Michigan State Lottery launch a Facebook promotion. It’s a pretty neat deal, all you have to do is LIKE the MI Lottery page and submit your information to be entered to win a Zamboni ride. And honestly, who doesn’t love a Zamboni ride.
The promo is live here https://www.facebook.com/MichiganLottery
Unfortunately, its only open to Michigan residents.
With Facebook’s move to deprecate FBML for tabs the documentation around how to make a “please Like! before…” has become much more choppy and inconsistent. Anyway, I recently found myself in a position where I needed to make this happen so here goes.
With in-line FBML deprecated, the only way to accomplish this without using a third party branded solution is to create a Facebook iframe app. Here are the steps you need to take to get something up using PHP and the Facebook PHP SDK.
1. Create a new Facebook Application at https://developers.facebook.com/apps
2. Configure your new Facebook App the enable “Website” and “Page Tab”. You’ll need to enter a valid URL for the following fields:
You’ll also want to use a HTTPs URL since Facebook sessions default to HTTPs by default and your iframe will be marked insecure if its over vanilla HTTP. For this walk through, lets assume were using https://www.setfive.com/fb/index.php? as the URL.
3. Now, you’ll want to add your new App to a Facebook Page. The easiest way to do this is to use this URL https://www.facebook.com/dialog/pagetab?app_id=YOUR_APP_ID&next=YOUR_URL replacing YOUR_APP_ID and YOUR_URL with your App ID and then a URL that is derived from your endpoint (or even just your endpoint). When you load that URL, you’ll be prompted to add your app to a page – select the page you want and submit the form.
4. The final piece is throwing together the actual PHP script. You’ll need the Facebook PHP SDK available on GitHub – https://github.com/facebook/php-sdk. Clone that and then this is the PHP script you’ll need:
And thats it! Now you’ll be able to gate content from non-fans while growing the fanbase of your Facebook Page.
Drop any questions in the comments.
I realized this morning that Anonymous Coward’s Facebook Phonebook Greasemonkey script broke awhile back so I decided to rewrite it from scratch.
The original instructions for how to install the script are available here.
I updated the original Userscripts page with the new script so you can download it here.
Facebook’s API + FBConnect is great but it has some severe limitations. Notably, it doesn’t expose all the functionality available on the Facebook site. Tonight in particular, I wanted to be able to copy a dump of my friends’ names and phone numbers off the site to load into a fresh cell phone. Unfortunately, looking at the API this isn’t possible.
Never fear – Greasemonkey provides enough of a hook into Firefox that it would be possible to write a UserScript to accomplish this.
Continuing beyond this point is probably against the Facebook TOS and will probably severely void your warranty.
You have been warned.
The following describes how to use this userscript to extract your Facebook “Phonebook”. It produces of a CSV of your friends’ names and phone numbers. Fair warning – this is a rough prototype and does almost no error handling. Also, since the “Phone” field is a free text field I can’t promise people will have formatted their numbers in any sane fashion. But either way it’s a good start to revering lost numbers.
So here is what you need to do to use the script:
1. Install Greasemonkey – https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/748
2. Follow these instructions to install the script – http://userscripts.org/about/installing
Edit: The script is also on Userscripts at http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/43681
3. Navigate over to http://m.facebook.com/friends.php? (You’ll have to login)
4. Answer yes to the prompt and sit back – the script will move through your phonebook and eventually dump you a CSV of the results.
5. Copy/Paste the CSV wherever you want.
6. Un-install the Greasemonkey script.
So that’s it, one less walled garden to worry about. And hopefully one less “I lost my cellphone!” event/group on facebook!
The script: