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 ?
I'm wondering if there is some way to send an email to participant in a google hangout. We'd like to adjust our hangout on air app so that when broadcasting in finished, all the participants would be send a link to the recording on youtube.
We've been looking through the Hangout API:
https://developers.google.com/+/hangouts/api/gapi.hangout.html#gapi.hangout.Participant
Superfically I guess we can't - we get the participants google ids, but I guess that's as far as we can go?
Any help much appreciated.
There are 3rd party apps that can be used with Hangout On Air to get registration info... checkout Business-Hangouts.com to see how they do it.
AFAIK, there is no way to get the info directly from Google using their API.
In my iPhone application, I wanted to add the function of signing into Facebook and letting a friend know about the app. I know how to sign in and get the friends list, but I cannot find a good way of inviting a friend. So far, I haven't been able to come up with a way to invite a friend (I don't think one can with the iphone facebook sdk yet) or send a message to the inbox. Is there a way to do either of these? If not are there any better options I haven't thought of? Thank you for any advice.
checkout this tutorial. i used it to get the facebook header files sorted out. Once thats done, everything should be in place for you to send a message easily :
http://www.mobileorchard.com/marketing-in-code-part-2-setting-a-users-status-in-facebook-from-an-iphone-app-a-tutorial/
check out This post.it shows what camn we do with facebook api
I have an app where we want users to be able to send us email/info. This would be a standard template which will open up on a button click within the app.
I am struggling at the moment to find a legit way to do it. The problem is there are 2 things I need.
1) A way to let users send email to me
2) A way of knowing the person sending me mail is actually someone who has downloaded my app.
Does anyone know if there is a way to do this? Does apple give us information/user id's or email id's of poeple who have downloaded the app?
Many thanks in advance for any help with this..
PB
Here's a good example on how to send email.
As for identifying if they send it from your app, you might have to create some login feature on your own. I haven't heard of Apple providing IDs of users who have bought your app.
I am looking for a way to connect to Facebook by allowing the user to enter in their username and password and have our app connect to their account and get their contacts so that they can invite them to join their group on our site. I have written a Facebook app before, but this is not an app as much as it is a connector so that they can invite all their friends or just some to the site we are working on.
I have seen several other sites do this and also connect to Yahoo, Gmail and Hotmail contacts. I don't think they are using Facebook Connect to do this since it is so new, but they may be.
Any solution in any language is fine as I can port whatever example to use C#. I cannot find anything specifically on Google or Facebook to address this specific problem. Any help is appreciated.
I saw a first answer get removed that had suggested I might need to scrape the friends page. The more I look around, this might be what I need to do. Any other way I think will require the person to add it as an app. I am wondering how a answer can get removed, maybe that user deleted it.
Not answering the question but hopefully providing some insight...
It's features like this that teach people that it is ok to enter their username and password for site A on a form from site B. This is most definitely not ok. Please do not make people think it is.
But maybe the Facebook API allows you to circumvent this problem, by making people log into Facebook itself to give your app access. A slight but important difference.
You can use Facebook Connect 'Account Linking'.
Python/Django example from Facebook developers wiki:
Page:
def invite_friends(request):
#HTML escape function for invitation content.
from cgi import escape
facebook_uid = request.facebook.uid
# Convert the array of friends into a comma-delimeted string.
exclude_ids = ",".join([str(a) for a in request.facebook.friends.getAppUsers()])
# Prepare the invitation text that all invited users will receive.
content = """<fb:name uid="%s" firstnameonly="true" shownetwork="false"/> wants to invite you to play Online board games, <fb:req-choice url="%s" label="Put Online Gaming and Video Chat on your profile!"/>""" % (facebook_uid, request.facebook.get_add_url())
invitation_content = escape(content, True)
return render_to_response('facebook/invite_friends.fbml',
{'content': invitation_content, 'exclude_ids': exclude_ids })
Template:
<fb:request-form action="http://apps.facebook.com/livevideochat/?skipped=1"
method="POST" invite="true" type="Online Games"
content="{{ content }}">
<fb:multi-friend-selector max="20"
actiontext="Here are your friends who aren't using Online Games and Live Video Chat. Invite them to play Games Online today!"
showborder="true" rows="5" exclude_ids="{{ exclude_ids }}"> </fb:request-form>
I asked this question awhile ago and before facebook connect was live and well. The best way to really do this is using facebook connect.
http://developers.facebook.com/connect.php?tab=website
I am currently using this on our live site and using the Facebook Developer Toolkit for .NET on Codeplex here:
http://www.codeplex.com/FacebookToolkit
Good luck!
I looked up that it is alright to answer my own post, so here it is.
It turns out that you will have to scrape the friends list which is not legal in facebook terms of use. So we will not be doing this for our sites. Here are a few articles that show what happens when you don't play by the rules. Plaxo tested their scraping with Scoble and Facebook shut down Scobles account in January of this year.
http://scobleizer.com/2008/01/03/what-i-was-using-to-hit-facebook/
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13577_3-9839474-36.html
Seems like Facebook has an api for this. Check this blog here.
http://developers.facebook.com/news.php?blog=1&story=73
Here is an open source PHP 5 tool to let you import contacts from both e-mail and some social networks including Facebook: OpenInviter is an open source PHP class, written in PHP5, for importing contacts from most of the well-known e-mail providers & social networks.
Just import them into Yahoo using FB Connect. All better? No screen scraping, no FB violations. Done.