Founder and Lead Developer
I have had it with these people. Seriously, of all the software in the world that can be classified as Beta, the last thing you’d expect is a movie rental service who probably bought off the shelf code and hacked it a little to use it. But hell, they dont care anymore, as far as they’re concerned, its a fashion statement to use unstable software in a public release!
Here it is, many considered it inevitable after OpenSocial, and Facebook have responded by opening up their own platform. Even though the OpenSocial adopters are sticking with Google for now, I think fbOpen will catch on eventually, at least I find it the easiest platform to develop for.
The fb-open-platform.tar.gz archive contains the tools necessary to implement Facebook Open Platform — including the API, FBML (Facebook Markup Language), FBJS (Facebook JavaScript), and FQL (Facebook Query Language) — in your own environment. It also contains libfbml-1.2.0.tar.gz, which contains the essential libraries for parsing and rendering FBML.
Here’s how the AdSense experiement on Facebook went:
AdSense eCPM: $0.35 (ranging from $0.02 to $1.60)
Cubics CPM (Average): $0.70 (minimum $0.67 to maximum $0.74)
Take Cubics, play safe, or take AdSense and try to maximize clicks in whatever way you can.
If this bit of information is anything to go by, the social networking bubble is either bordering on the edge of being ridiculous, or Yahoo might be on to something.
Yahoo are looking a little stagnant, and a switch to social media might create the largest social network overnight. On the other hand, if implemented poorly, Yahoo will keep going down the drain. With 500 million active users compared to MySpace’s 110m and Facebook’s 60m, Yahoo will automatically get the largest userbase in no time at all.
This represents the first time a major force is switching to the social format rather than experimenting with smaller projects like Orkut or the now dysfunctional MyWallop. Open application development is also on offer, so this might as well become much bigger than Facebook or MySpace, if they do it right!
This was in an update sent to certain users by Facebook.
A lot of people have cried out over Facebook’s $15 billion valuation. However, there are certain points that support such a ridiculously high value. Investor Paul Buchheit has written an interesting article about how Facebook has the benefit of knowing about your entire real-life social network, clouded only by a few random online friends here and there, and how they could leverage it.
This comes from padrenel’s blog. It discusses important things to know while getting started with Facebook application development. Must read in my opinion, helped me immensely. It discusses:
Trust me, it doesn’t feel good, but it proves a point, I made a fair game! Yes, the Indian Premier League has begun and so has my application for Facebook. Here’s how I’m doing in the fantasy game:
Not looking too good, I’m afraid!
There are many advantages to using the shell, one is making backups. With the following code and a cron job, periodically backing up MySQL databases is a breeze.
#!/bin/sh mkdir `date +%m-%d-%y-%Hx%M` cd `date +%m-%d-%y-%Hx%M` mysqldump -h localhost -u user -ppassword dbname > file.sql
Monetizing Facebook applications is a difficult job. First, there’s no dominant ad network for Facebook. I’ve started experimenting with AdSense on some pages of my Indian Premier League application. Here are some things I’ve learn so far: