Facebook Mobile

Facebook Mobile Facebook Developer’s Garage January 23 rd 2008

Facebook Mobile

Introduction to Facebook Mobile

A demo application

What can and can’t be done

Mobile browsing and SMS messaging

A few technical details

Demo app – Secret Status

The Secret Status application

Allows the user to enter two status messages

Allow some friends to view your secret status

Receive updates from the secret status changes of others

Demo app – Secret Status

Secret Status Mobile

Cut down functionality:

Update your status messages

View status messages of your friends

A basic profile view

Mobile Capabilities

Elements of Facebook Mobile

Mobile homepage

Mobile-specific profile

Mobile-specific application canvas pages

Receive SMS messages from users (on O2)

Send SMS messages to a user

Mobile Capabilities

Mobile homepage

status updates

events

cut down newsfeed

links to Facebook tasks

links to your profile

Little an app can add here

Mobile Capabilities

Mobile-specific profile

XHTML content

a subset of FBML

Can contain links to the application canvas page

Automatically served as part of the m.facebook.com domain

Set profile markup with the updated parameter of the setFBML API call

Mobile Capabilities

Mobile-specific canvas pages

XHTML content

a subset of FBML

Can be interactive e.g. form posts

Served inside the fb:mobile tag

Rendering will depend on the mobile device’s capabilities

Technicalities

Canvas page issues

Canvas pages have identical URLs e.g. http://apps.facebook.com/secretstatus

Canvas pages try to detect mobile device

receive fb_sig_mobile=1 in POST

But mobile devices pretend to be normal browsers

As a result users may be served the “regular” site ( = x00kb download)

Technicalities

Canvas page issues

To force Facebook Mobile display

add e.g. is_mobile=1 to all links, especially from the profile

switch output at the top of the page

output code within an fb:mobile tag

Technicalities

Receive SMS messages

Tick “ My application uses the mobile platform” in the app settings

On O2, send a text to 32665

Send message as: app_canvas_name <query>

The message is posted to the app’s index page

fb_sig_sms is set to 1 in the POST

Technicalities

Send SMS messages

User needs to have activated Facebook mobile

Enter phone number (and pretend to be on O2)

Receive an SMS confirmation code

Enter the code on Facebook

Technicalities

Send SMS messages

Needs to have given your application permission to send SMS by visiting:

http://www.facebook.com/authorize.php?api_key=YOUR_API_KEY&v=1.0&ext_perm=sms

Possible to query for whether permission has been given via the API

(Signup is a poor user journey)

Technicalities

Send SMS messages

if($facebook->api_client->call_method('facebook.sms.canSend',array('uid' => $userID))) { try { $facebook->api_client->call_method('facebook.sms.send',array( 'uid' => $user ID , 'message' => "Test SMS“)); } catch(FacebookRestClientException $ex) { $error[] = $ex->getMessage(); } }

Conclusions