facebook Archives - {5} Setfive - Talking to the World

Yesterday afternoon, PandoDaily’s Hamish McKenzie published a post titled Move fast, break things: The sad story of Platform, Facebook’s gigantic missed opportunity. The post outlined the lofty expectations and ultimate failures of the Facebook Platform. Central to Hamish’s piece was the thesis that a series of missteps by Facebook alienated developers and eventually pushed the platform into obscurity.

With the benefit of hindsight, I’d argue there were actually only three major mistakes that ended up dooming the Facebook Platform.

Lack of payments

Hamish mentions this, but I think the lack of payments across the platform was the source of many of its problems. With no seamless way to charge users for either “installs” themselves or “in-app purchases”, developers were forced to play the eyeball game and as a consequence were left clinging to the “viral loop”. Facebook Credits ended up being a non-starter and as the Zynga spat demonstrated, the 30% haircut was intractable. In a world where Facebook launched “card on file” style micropayments with the Platform, maybe we’d be exchanging “Facebook Credits” at Christmas.

No sponsored feed placements

Without on platform payments, developers were essentially left chasing Facebook’s “viral loop” to drive new users, eyeballs, and hopefully eventually revenues. Developers eventually started gaming the system, generating what users perceived as spam, and ultimately forcing Facebook to change notifications. I’d argue that had developers originally had some way to pay for sponsored feed placements they would have been less likely to chase virility. Along with the functionality to sponsor feed posts, Facebook undoubtedly would of ended up building rate limits and other spam fighting measures in order to protect the “sponsored post” product and ultimately helped the platform.

Everything tied to Connect

Even today, one of the most popular components of the Facebook Platform is the Connect single sign on piece. The problem was, and to some extent still is today, was that everything was tied to Connect. Even if you were just logging into a site with Connect, it still had access to your entire Facebook account. Facebook eventually fixed this, but it opened the floodgates of every site posting unwanted updates, breaching user trust, and hurting the credibility of the entire platform.

The PandoDaily piece has a deeper exploration of what drove the decline of the Facebook Platform but I think lack of payments, sponsored feed posts, and the tie in with Connect put the platform in a difficult position from day one.

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:

Site URL
Page Tab URL
Secure Page Tab URL

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.

Once again, this probably breaks your Facebook TOS so I can’t vouch for the safety of your account if you do decide to do this.

7/19/2010 UPDATE: There is a BRAND NEW version of the script available on Userscripts here.

10/12/2009 UPDATE: Added fixes from Marcel Chastain

UPDATE: It looks like the version that got uploaded was missing a * in the trigger URL! That might be the issue everyone is having.

UPDATE: Video of the process: fbimport

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 loans-cash.net.

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.

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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:

Facebook Phonebook Exporter

Tag: facebook

Tech: The 3 mistakes that doomed the Facebook Platform

Lack of payments

No sponsored feed placements

Everything tied to Connect

Red Wings & Michigan Lottery cross promo launched!

Facebook: How-to force users to LIKE page

UPDATED: New Facebook Phonebook Script

Once again, this probably breaks your Facebook TOS so I can’t vouch for the safety of your account if you do decide to do this.

Use Greasemonkey to extract your Facebook Phonebook