I'm designing a mobile application which communicates with an API and I was wondering something.
My app is kind of a social network on which you can have friends and stuff like this. I wanted to add a feature to access phone contacts and see who is not subscribed on the app to invite him, and also ask to access to Facebook's friend list of the user and do the same thing.
I also want to check if a person in your phone's contacts is registered in the application to send him a friend request.
But the way i see it seems pretty heavy, i mean sending your whole phone contact list through the internet so the API can check every phone number and email adress to see if it's already in the database... And maybe unsafe too ?
How can i achieve such a system ?
This seems like a pretty basic need but I am unsure how to do it. Use case:
Company pays FB $$$ for mobile app install.
User clicks on facebook add to install your app
User starts the app. The code in the initialization function (appDidFinishLaunchingWithOptions on IOS) calls FBAppEvents activateApp]
Presumably somewhere in the
Facebook SDK the IDFA is sent to facebook.
Facebook correlates
the IDFA with the facebook app events to figure out what facebook
add was clicked. This data is then fed to facebook analytics so you
can see what campaign was used.
What I need is that after step 5 completes a way to figure what user ID's are associated with the specific facebook campaign. We would use this in our own internal tools to measure the campaign success. Preferably I would do this on the mobile end and send up the campaign source. Alternatively, we could do it server side. But I just don't see a way to get at the campaign data.
You could use Deferred Deep Linking with a parameter flagging the campaign install source. You'd miss out on view-through attribution (you could use Ads Manager to scale it up in aggregate), but it'd get you some user-level tracking.
I have an idea to develop a Facebook app which notifies the user through SMS when his/her friends come online. The user can pre-select the friends he/she wanted to get SMS notifications of.
This is my first attempt at developing for Facebook so I have zero experience and knowledge about the platform. I just want to know if my idea for such an app is possible? Does Facebook have an API for SMSes? Or do they let 3rd party messaging APIs (such as this one I came across) to work with them.
Thank you.
A Facebook app is actually ran off of your server and you can do anything that you want as long as you stay inside the limits of what you requested as far as information the app needs. As far and getting the information it is relatively easy. I made a extremely complicated app in 3 days. Once you read and get how to pull certain information, the rest is cake walk
My application isn't going to be revolved around soundcloud users, I will be using it for its nice api that is provided to stream audio. I also want to use the javascript upload feature but that seems to be out of the question too.
The record widget should be able to upload the audio to your server so that you can upload the audio not as an individual user.
I still haven't been able to get my app to work without using their authentication window.
Any help would be appreciated.
Nearly everything you do with the SoundCloud API must be done on behalf of a SoundCloud account. You can only use the SoundCloud API to stream content from or upload content to a SoundCloud account.
If you'd like to have SoundCloud functionality in your app, I'd recommend allowing users to connect their SoundCloud accounts.
"Authenticating without the SoundCloud Connect Screen", from the API docs: http://developers.soundcloud.com/docs/api/guide#user-credentials
With this method you can log in as a user in the code. Since every app must be registered to a user anyway, you can make a new username to register the app, and log in with that one.
Let's say I have app on iPhone and Windows Phone 7. How to share (ex. Note) between my both apps, regardless any platform.
Update
Guess this question is very broad, my bad.
Be more specific, I want the user to go through his contact list and share through my app. How do I identify if the other user installed my app? and what platform he/she using?
Using the contact list isn't a good way to "share" in this regard.
You're asking two questions here:
How to build a system to share data between two mobile clients, irrespective of platform?
How to best enable users to find their friends to share data?
Let's start with the 2nd question.
I would leverage services like Twitter and Facebook and have your app connect with your users facebook account. This is a well known approach, and avoids having to roll your own account system.
With facebook as an example:
Facebook connect, you can get the facebookID of your user, as well as their friends facebookID. You'll need a backend webservice which you can query users by fbID.
When a user opts to use their facebook account, store their FacebookID on your backend service. Then using facebook's api's get a list of their friends facebookID's. Your app will lookup each ID using your backend service, and if it finds one, then you know that friend has also installed the app, and connected it to facebook.
So if Alice installed your app, connects to facebook, and she is friends with Bob, who also has installed your app, your back end service would return that Bob's facebookID is known to your app, and thus the two of them can share to each other using some protocol that you design.
If their friend's ID isn't known to your system, I would send them a facebook message, or post on thier wall with a restful link that invites them to check out the note you want to share on the web, and place the link to the app on the same page.
Due to the high level of your question, this answer is a bit of a 20,000ft view, and assumes you know how to build a web service.
If you want to see a great example of an app that makes use Facebook and or Twitter to find friends who also use the same app, I recommend checking out Groupme. It's free, and available for WP7, iPhone, and Android. It's a group SMS app, and uses your contact list, facebook, and twitter, to setup friends.
For the first question, you'll need to make use of a backend webservice. User would elect to share either in-app, or by posting to their facebook, with a weblink. In-app sharing, I would use an inbox approach. A user posts a message to their friend, and it gets stored in a queue. The app periodically checks the users queue to see if any new "shares" have been posted. If so, get that data, and present it to the user. Your back end service should also take advantage of newer app concepts like push notifications, because thats what users expect.
I would suggest using a web service such as Parse. This will allow you to focus on your app development and not worry about server coding.
Currently they do not have a Windows Phone 7 SDK but it is just a matter of making the REST requests manually to the service.