I created a Facebook application which occasionally publishes information to the timeline. As I was developing it, I noticed that at some point a box with the title of my application appeared in the timeline (a box similar to the "Friends" or "Activity" boxes). It contained an overview of the last posts published by my application.
Today, I noticed that this box is now gone from the timeline.
Does anybody know how are these boxes created? Is it something that Facebook do automatically? Is it possible to manually (or programmatically) put it back?
Any information on this would be great.
Application box will appear in user's timeline as long as you used Add To Timeline social plugin or requested publish_actions permission from user and published an OpenGraph action.
As long as you have defined aggregations, the box will some and go depends on Facebook's algorithms. Usually, activity us grouped in the Activity (Recent) box on the user's timeline. But sometimes one of the aggregation boxes appear in the timeline too - unfortunately, there is no way to force it to appear all the time.
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I want to create an app that simply allows a user to log in, touch a like button, and then the app logs them out. I am wondering if this type of app would be allowed by Facebook, since the main functionality is all Facebook related. The app would be used by business to help them increase their Facebook page following. Is this allowed?
Yes, you are. Pratically every like button you see in blog posts and product pages in online stores works like that (except for the logout).
I am using the Facebook iOS SDK 3.1 in my latest, and I'm using the native share dialogue from FBNativeDialogue.
It has a "friends" button in the corner, which I always throught was to tag friends (just like the location button tags the location), but I realised that this is privacy settings for the post.
Therefor, Im still confounded how you can tag friends in a post. Nothing seems to happend when i type # followed by my friends names, is this not implemented yet ? And does anyone know of clever way to implement this ?
What the customer wants is the similar to the "Who are you with?" button as shown here:
I just don't think this is possible, considering the current Facebook SDK (3.5.1) documentation -- https://developers.facebook.com/docs/howtos/ios-6/#nativepostcontroller. It states:
iOS 6 includes a native Share Sheet that lets users post status updates, photos, links, and locations to Facebook and includes support for setting the audience for the post and tagging the post with a location.
Even when you post something on Facebook from iOS' Notification Center, it only allows you to share the information mentioned above, without tagging friends.
Instead, you could use the Facebook views, as they do here https://developers.facebook.com/docs/tutorials/ios-sdk-tutorial/show-friends/. But if you have to use the Native Dialogs, I can't see a way. If you get it to work, please let us know the solution.
Does anyone know how these kind of functionality can be implemented?
How can we get PlayNow kind of link ( I want to add my own custom link at that place)
How to get user images on this kind of aggregation.
As far as I can tell, this is a custom implementation from Facebook that you cannot control. Facebook provides custom aggregation on the newsfeed for certain popular actions, such as playing games, reading news or watching videos. As you can see in the aggregation you have posted, each app is different.
When a certain set of users read news using your app, and Facebook chooses to display an aggregation of "X and y more friends recently read articles" on those users' friends' news feeds, your app might come in that aggregation. The "read now" button comes on its own, since Facebook understands what your object is.
The aggregations you can control are those that consist of only your app, and you can do that in the Open Graph panel for your app on the Developer site. Just go into aggregations and design it to your choice. This is how I implemented it for myself:
This is how it would look like in a user's Home Feed. The text, "Share your twocents about Dil Chahta hain..." can be set up according to your requirements.
Secondly, you can control the aggregation for your own app on a user's timeline. This is how my app's aggregation looks on a user's timeline. Do note that currently, only two aggregations are shown for a user, instead of 3 as is displayed in my image (which was taken prior to the approval stage).
That is an aggregation that facebook is making for a specific type of applications: Games.
You can set your app as a Game in the app settings, first tab (Basic) first section (Basic Info) in the Category field.
If you do that then facebook should include your "game" when they aggregate this feed story to friends.
If you do that how ever then you can't change the text from "Play Now", as far as I'm aware.
Using the open graph you can define the obejcts which your app uses and the actions users do on them.
Then you can control how the stories produced by your app are aggregated into the timeline of a user.
The official guide is pretty straight forward and have good examples that you can follow to understand how things work.
If you have a more specific question regarding the open graph then ask away.
I'm interested in creating an app on an external website that will publish logged-in user's article reads to their timeline. However, I've noticed that when a story is published to timeline, other users who are not connected with your app, are forced to "Add to Timeline". To me, this defeats the purpose because I want users who are not associated with our brand to discover our content and then add it to the timeline if they are a fan of ours. Is there a way to turn off this setting? or is everyone FORCED to add an app to the timeline before they can see the content?
for instance, when I click on a story posted by the Washington Post on someone's timeline, I get this screen -> http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1169963/timeline.png when I expected it to just bring me straight to the article. Most users are going to abandon the app at this point and never click on a Washington Post article again
and it looks like people are making browser plugins to stop this from happening:
http://techcrunch.com/2011/12/01/frictionless-kills-facebook-social-article-readers-dead/
so, is there a way for developers to prevent this all together?
What do you mean about FORCED ? If i give permissions, after app produces timeline posts, it will combine and show as an application box in my timeline. But before it, i can see my friends timeline apps without installing them. Also same in newsticker in news feed...
For example in my profile http://facebook.com/chaylock , you should see my NIVEA Mega Kutu timeline app without interacting app..
I would like to be able to place a permanent image or better yet and iframe in a user's facebook page. The image or iframe would be reloaded from my website every time the page is viewed so that it contains the most recent data.
Can I do this? If not, how close can I get? (For instance, posting things in the User's info page, or in their feeds.)
You used to be able to do this using Profile Boxes, but there's no similar functionality that currently exists to do what you're describing.