Facebook Cookbook - Jay Goldman [5]
Jayant Agarwalla
Will Pate
Alistair Morton
Rajat Agarwalla
Mark Slee
Ilya Grigorik
James Walker
Daniel Burka
Jason DeFillippo
Martin Kuplens-Ewart
Pete Forde
Rowan Hick
Alain Chesnais
Jeff Tseng
A special thanks to Will, who shot my Profile pic one cold day on a photo walk through Toronto’s Junction neighborhood.
My gratitude to my reviewers, who helped turn my (sometimes incoherent) ramblings into the book you hold today. In no particular order:
Jesse Stay (http://staynalive.com)
Pete Bratach (http://facebook.com)
Peter Meth (http://softersoftware.com)
Michael Porterfield (http://wealthengine.com)
Tim Consolazio (http://tcoz.com, http://nabbr.com)
Thanks also to the amazing crew at O’Reilly, who made life for this first-time author a whole lot easier. Particular thanks go out to Jacque McIlvaine for handling the administrivia; Sarah Kim, Maureen Jennings, Marsee Henon, and Laurel Ackerman for marketeering; Adam Witwer and Marlowe Shaeffer for handling my sometimes clueless questions; Genevieve d’Entremont for making my ramblings into readable copy; Sarah Schneider for turning this into a real book; Brady Forrest (and Jen Pahlka, even though she’s not really an O’Reillyian) for the speaking gigs; and my editor, Mary Treseler, for putting up with me and for shared stories about dogs.
Apologies to Eli
In searching for an example ID I could use for applications, users, groups, networks and the like, I settled on 12345. It turns out, much to both my delight and surprise, that Facebook has actually assigned that ID to a user: Eli Richlin. So, my apologies to Eli for using him as an example throughout the book. Apart from being user 12345, Eli is apparently a Harvard graduate and an NYU grad student. Good luck with everything, Eli, and thanks for being such a model user!
Chapter 1. Introducing Facebook Platform
Many profound questions have haunted scholars and thinkers since the dawn of humanity: Why are we here? Does God exist? What is art? Where does the other sock go? The question of whether or not to build an application on Facebook[1] Platform is not one of them.
That said, since you’re holding this book in your hands, you’ve likely already spent some time pondering this question. Perhaps you have recently been bitten by a zombie or been given some fish for an aquarium you didn’t know you owned. Maybe you were challenged to a round of movie trivia or told that you were someone’s Top Friend. If you’re a Facebook user (and it’s increasingly likely that you are), you’ve probably installed an application or been invited to install one by a member of your ever-growing social network.
Although it may seem impossible to live without those applications, Platform hasn’t always been part of Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg unleashed Facebook Platform on May 24, 2007, at an event held at the San Francisco Design Center attended by 800 developers. For all the epic speechwriting and grandiose claims (Mark opened his presentation with, “Today, together, we’re going to start a movement”), that day really did mark an important moment in the history of the industry. The enthusiastic and decidedly nervous founder of Facebook might just as well have been standing on that blue stage and waving a vial of gold over his head, yelling, “Gold! Gold! Gold from the American River!” Just as surely as Samuel Brannan’s march through the streets of San Francisco heralded the start of the California Gold Rush, news of the Platform exploded onto the Web. Technorati shows nearly 500 blog posts with the term “Facebook Platform” from that day, up from practically none the day before (see Figure 1-1).
Figure 1-1. Blog posts about “Facebook Platform” since May 2007
At the time of the announcement, Facebook counted just over 24 million active users (defined as people who have returned to the site in the last 30 days). At the time this book was written, its user base has exploded to more