September 28, 2007
How to Build Your Own Facebook App
When the Facebook application platform launched a month or two ago, I thought about trying to put together a quick app or two, but somehow never got round to it, partly because I didn't fancy wading through the documentation, partly because Facebook is - at the end of the day - just another site with its own, proprietary interface standards.
For anyone who wants to put their own application onto Facebook today, however, the situation is much different.
At one extreme are applications that provide a conduit for you to get content of your own choosing onto your Facebook profile. Grazr is one example - it allows you to pipe and display the contents of an OPML feed of your choosing within Facebook:
MyStuff is an application that allows you cut'n'paste embed code from other sites into your MyStuff app. This sort of "generic container" has started to appear on the webtops recently, like the PageFlakes Anything Flake, for example.
Here's my personal Mogulus TV channel in the MyStuff panel, which plays content I've popped into it 24 hours a day, and lets me - or anyone who visits my Facebook profile page - stumble across programmes I know of are interest to me...
What this means is that I can get feed content and embeddable widgets of my own choosing into Facebook, which is neat, whether or not the original source has developed their own Facebook app.
But what about developing my own app?
Here are three ways that I know of, all of which require you to install the Facebook developer app, so you can get a key for your new application:
- Dapper Facebook AppMaker: Dapper is a web app that lets you quickly and easily define a screenscraper and generate various outputs from the scraped data (such as an XML output, or an RSS feed). The Dapper Facebook AppMaker will build a Facebook application around the output of one or more Dapps -just follow the instructions and fill in a couple of form fields. For example, in this app I have added two panels - one that displays a direct RSS feed from an OpenLearn Course Unit (with "issues"), the other which provides a search interface over OpenLearn content:
- Microsoft Popfly Facebook block: Popfly is MicroSoft's mashup tool; the Popfly Facebook block provides you with access to your own profile information and a tool for deploying your mashup application back into Facebook; (just by the by, Popfly also has a block that integrates with Dapper);
- Widgetbox App Accelerator: if you are a widget builder, and have registered your widget with Widgetbox, you can grab a Facebook developer key and turn the widget into a standalone Facebook app simply by working through a form based wizard.
- [UPDATE] Ning Facebook Integration enables you to add videos, music, podcasts, and photo slideshows that appear on Ning network pages to Facebook as standalone Facebook apps.
Whilst Facebook application development is still probably one-for-the-techies, there's no doubt that it's getting easier to deploy apps of your own creation in Facebook...
If you actually want to write some code of your own, Digital Web magazine has a short article on geting started in PHP: How To Build A Facebook Application.
Amazon have made available a set of resources that take you through the process of building a scaleable Facebook app using Amazon web services: Amazon Web Services for Facebook Developers
PS Here's something interesting for anyone who wants to host their own Facebook app - a preconfigured Amazon cloud image: "HelloWorld" Facebook Application AMI
PPS if you know of an existing web page application you want to turn into a facebook app simply by displaying it in an iframe, you can develop the app without any coding, additional hosting etc etc: How to write a FaceBook Application in 10 minutes (check out several example apps built using this technique
PPPS Drupal for Facebook - power a Facebook app from Drupal...