iPhone Game Development - Chris Craft [90]
You are getting to use Facebook's trusted authentication system. Users never give you their Facebook credentials, which protects them and you. Not only do you not have to worry about securing this information, you don't have to worry about supporting the infrastructure required to maintain this system. Facebook pays the bills for all the hardware, electricity, and people needed to make everything work. This saves you both time and money.
Another benefit of using Facebook Connect for iPhone is that users of your applications can make sure of their Facebook identity information. People have already set up their profiles on Facebook, with their real names, photos, and personal information. Instead of having to enter in yet another user for yet another application and duplicate their information once again, they can simply click an Allow button and do it in one simple step through Facebook Connect.
Your application can also be granted access to the user's friends list stored on Facebook. This could be used for in-game chatting, multiplayer games, and more.
Because Facebook uses dynamic privacy, users can allow and disallow access to their personal information as needed and as they see fit. This keeps users in power, and helps them feel safe sharing their personal and confidential information with people who are, in effect, strangers. Users always have the option to not allow an application access to their information. An application can never have permanent access to a user's personal data.
Facebook is all about helping people connect and share with other people in their lives. Because it is built from the ground up to accomplish this one goal, it is a great mechanism to enable social distribution of your application. Many Facebook applications have millions of monthly active users. By tapping into this resource, you open your application up to many new users who may not have heard of your application otherwise.
Note
It is up to iPhone developers like you to create tomorrow's great iPhone game experiences. Now take what you have learned and create something amazing. Start from the foundation we have provided you and add something great to it!
Analyzing Business Aspects
You have now learned a great deal about the technical aspects of Facebook Connect on how to integrate and take advantage of this great new technology. It is time to consider the business side of the coin and how you can leverage Facebook Connect into creating more successful iPhone apps.
With all the great capabilities you have seen so far, it might surprise you to know that we have not yet covered one of the best features of the Facebook Connect API: It is completely and entirely free. Not only that, you don't have to pay Facebook anything to register as a Facebook developer. Facebook spends well over one million dollars per month on electricity alone to power all the servers in their datacenters. When you start to add up hardware, bandwidth, and personnel costs, the overhead expense becomes truly large (for them, not you). Any time your application can freely use services provided by and paid for by another party, it is effectively money in the bank for you.
Another great feature of using the Facebook Connect API is that your application can stand out in the crowd of other iPhone applications on the App Store. Now that there are currently more than 35,000 applications on the App Store, it's more important than ever to differentiate your product from your competitors' products. Each user profile update on Facebook from your app is effectively free advertising for your application. Links to a Web page can even be included, which makes this an effective form of viral marketing. Currently there have been more than one billion applications downloaded from the App Store, and users want