My First Facebook Application
Posted by Jon Lee in Personal, tags: facebook, Facebook-Application, PhotogenicFacebook applications are hot right now. In fact, application short-names are going fast like domain names. You might be hard pressed to find a decent application name with the word “friend” in it!
I started tinkering with their Developers API yesterday and I whipped up my first Facebook application. It doesn’t do much but I think it spices up profiles pretty nicely!
I must commend Facebook on a great API. It is very easy to use and their FBML (Facebook Markup Language) is a great accomplishment as it keeps everything looking Facebooky — something Myspace definitely doesn’t have.
Anyway, the application is called Photogenic and it basically displays a random breathtaking/beautiful photograph on your profile. Photographs are taken from the a thousand and one site and are all rated at least 3/5 stars.
Click here to install the Photogenic Facebook application and help me test it out. I welcome any suggestions and comments!
Edit: If you get an error message while loading the page from application, it’s not my fault. Facebook is having a few hiccups right now (Aug 23, 11:45pm EST).
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the term “API” intimidates me. is that normal?
You don’t strike me as being easily intimidated, Danielle, but it is pretty normal. I’ve worked with a few software developers that seemed to avoid APIs at all cost
I actually was looking for an app to put my photos on Facebook but I decided against it and I’ll tell you why.
Facebook’s EULA states that anything that appears on their site is automatically their property, meaning you have no copyright…rights when it comes to intellectual property that’s put up on Facebook. Whether this applies to other people using your work or not (which I don’t doubt since if they said they got it off Facebook…that means Facebook would have to sue and not you) but either way, I doubt too many photographers want to display their work on that site.
TOo bad a thousand and one site is down at the moment. Couldn’t have been your doing?
Good job on a nice API. And I must say, as an amateur photographer, that the multi forked lightning shot is just phenomenal.
Cool application, I just started using facebook. This will be a nice addition.
Oops, it’s not down I just made a typo in the link!
My guess would be a long exposure and VERY good timing!
Wow.. that could be bad, sneaky Facebook although I’m sure its for their own protection I mean if I owned facebook I probably would state something like that as well
Intimidates me too, it usually means “a bunch of random hacks and hoops to jump through to use our data” but facebook’s API is the amongst the best I’ve seen. They even have tools to let you try out different commands.
What language are they using? Is it in PHP?
Just installed it
Looks nice!
I have had a look at facebook’s api myself. Did figure it out in 5 minutes so decided to give up for now. But in terms of all that stuff looking nice…. man i really doubte that. Facebook is loosing it’s attractiveness it once had.
1. everybody can use it now (it use to be exclusive to college/uni students)
2. if you google for “facebook page with 200 aps on it” or something like that u will find out where this whole thing with customization is going. It ALMOST looks like myspace (which in my opinion is dieing right now – every other post you see is spam)
[...] got a couple requests on creating a Facebook Application tutorial after announcing Photogenic, my first Facebook Application. However, this seems fairly redundant as Facebook themselves have already created a great [...]
Yes, PHP5 in particular but there are client libraries for PHP4 and pretty much any language you can think of!
Oh, I understand why they did it but from a photographer’s point of view, it’s not in our best interest to post our work on Facebook. I would do the same in their position, though.