Facebook Cookbook - Jay Goldman [162]
2
The service is not available at this time.
4
The application has reached the maximum number of requests allowed. More requests are allowed once the time window has completed.
5
The request came from a remote address not allowed by this application.
100
One of the parameters specified was missing or invalid.
101
The API key submitted is not associated with any known application.
102
The session key was improperly submitted or has reached its timeout. Direct the user to log in again to obtain another key.
103
The submitted call_id was not greater than the previous call_id for this session.
104
Incorrect signature.
200
The application does not have permission to operate on the passed-in uid parameter.
Discussion
The long, long list of Facebook error codes can be found at http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/Error_codes.
If you’re getting an error and are having trouble tracking it down in the context of your code, try extracting the call and running it directly inside the API Test Console found at http://developers.facebook.com/tools.php?api.
Chapter 10. Marketing Your App
You’ve released the world’s greatest Facebook application, and all 500 of your closest friends have it installed. Your install base is slowly climbing, and your daily active stat looks good so far. Great riches await you, if you can just figure out how to get from here to there. Now what?
Marketing Facebook apps is no different from marketing any other kind of web app, widget, doohickey, or thingamabob. Some people have a natural flair for this kind of thing, while others have a natural flair for writing programming language compilers. It’s unlikely that you’re the kind of person with an instinct for both, so if you’re in the latter camp and are serious about the success of your app, you might want to find someone in the former to help you out.
The bad news: there’s no magic bullet or panacea that will instantly turn your app into a Top 10 and bring dump trucks filled with money to your doorstep. The good news: if you work as hard at promoting your app as you did at designing and building it, you can be very successful and earn a really good living doing this. This chapter looks at a few different avenues you have available for marketing your app, as well as a few techniques you can use to assess where you’re at and decide how to move forward.
Attracting Users Through Facebook Ads
—Alain Chesnais (see his bio in Contributors)
Problem
I launched my app a month ago, but I still only have a handful of users!
Solution
You need to promote your app to make your potential users aware of its existence. The most effective way to do so is through advertising.
Discussion
A common mistake many developers make is to assume that simply building an app is enough to have it go viral and reach millions of users overnight. Good apps only really go viral after they have attained a sufficient number of users. To see why this is true, let’s assume that your app has launched and you get one new user virally every day for every hundred users you currently have. That’s 1% growth every day. Let’s assume that you start off with 10 of your best friends signing up and let it run. This type of viral growth is exponential, but the startup phase can be painfully slow. In this particular case, it would get you to 13 users in a month and 60 users after 6 months.
So what can you do about it? The key thing to do when launching a new app is to promote it and let people know that they should be trying it out. There are currently tens of thousands of apps on Facebook. You want users to know about yours. Your best bet is to run advertisements within Facebook, and the most obvious way is to use Facebook’s ads. These appear randomly in users’ Notifications or in the ad slot on the lefthand side of each Facebook page. You bid for ad placement for given demographics and pay for the placement. Try different ads and aim at different demographics to see which are the most productive.
Let’s look at how we might