Facebook APP alerts - The same thing as app requests? - facebook

I've used 'Are You Interested', a Facebook APP and when something on that app happens (such as a user sends me a message in that app) then I will see (to the left under APPS) a numeric value representing the number of new events that have happened on 'Are You Interested' since I last looked.
I want to do the same thing with my App, as it's also a niche dating site. I'd like to notify users when someone sends them a message or views their profile. I was told that I should search for app requests. However the code samples that I see seem to be slightly different than what I want to accomplish.
The information I am finding seems as though it is intended for me to allow my users to request things from their friends. That's completely different than what I want to do. There's no need for them to request anything from friends.
When I tried sending one to my test account, just to see what happens..it incremented the numeric value to the left under APPS by 1, which is a good thing, but the text was so generic, it was something like, "So and so is requesting something in [sitename]", but I don't want it to say that and I didn't see anywhere to change this text....furthermore, it added a 'Notification' to the very top of Facebook with the same generic request message. Again, that's not what I'm looking for. When I receive these APP Alerts for other apps, they don't add a 'Notification' up top of Facebook, and I don't want to either. I do believe that the code snippets I found under 'Requests' is something different than what I'm looking to achieve.
Just to summarize: I have a dating app, and people can send messages to eachother. I want an APP Alert (as I'm referring to it) to be seen to the left under Apps and also to the right in the bookmarks area, but I want the message to not be so generic and I don't want users to be selecting friends to request something. I want this action to come from my server and sent to the user that will be receiving the alert. I also do not want a facebook 'Notification' up top each time they receive a message. I hope I'm being clear in what I'm trying to accomplish. Thanks in advance for any guidance. -Chris

Related

Why "Fbclid" is not enough for attribution?

I've been tormented for a few months by this question!
I don't understand how Facebook pixel works deeply (and I assume only FB devs Know) but I have a few questions, if anyone can help me:
1- I launch a conversion campaign on Facebook ads, a specific ad gets a click, and a unique "fbclid" gets attributed to that click (?); if a conversion happens, and I send back the fbclid, Isn't Facebook supposed to be able to attribute it to the specific ad that generated that click, thus that fbclid? I thought that was the whole point of having a Server-to-server solution? since Apple announced iOS updates blocking cookies?
I come from an affiliate marketing background, we use tools like "Everflow" to track affiliate links, with a "transaction_id", that is, a unique value generated on every outgoing click. I thought the same logic would apply to fbclid.
Why are we asked to pass back to Facebook so much data when a conversion happens, like a name, email, etc... to be able to attribute the conversion to a campaign
( AND EVEN SO! Our Tracking is only 80% Accurate!!)
2- Can anyone explain how Facebook pixel actually works ? ignoring the Server to server (Conversion API ) solution, how does the Facebook base code + the conversion event script work to be able to attribute a conversion to a specific campaign? does it store the fbclid in your cookies? and when a conversion happens execute a request to Facebook?
3- AM I talking about 2 Different things here: FB attribution to campaigns VS Event matching? are they the same concept? Why is this so confusing to me? I couldn't find someone that's asking the same question, is it because I am missing something very obvious?
Thank you in advance!!

How to send message to specific facebook user from website?

My goal is to make a website, in which user could customize a photo and then provide his friends indicators like name or id. My next task is to fetch that info from database and send messages on specific date to provided users. Ex birthday wishes, greetings, and so on.
I studied facebook send api for a few days now and couldn't find solution for myself. If I want to send message, I need to have Page-scoped id of user, which is acquired when the person text you first, which is not desired, because person wouldn't know what it is.
Also I was looking into Customer matching API, also seems to require the same PSID. The next thing I checked was Send Dialog API, which seems to send messages instantly, but not on the specific date. Also I checked unofficial facebook-chat-api, which asks for user ID, whereas I can find my id, I couldn't find ids of my friends.
So I just want to know is it even possible, if yes, I'd really appreciate your help.
User to User communication is not possible (and not allowed) in an automatic way, there is no API for it except for the Send Dialog. The Messenger platform is for page to user communication only.
Do not use inofficial tools, they are not allowed and might get you banned.

Facebook Developer Account always disabled after couple of days of using Messenger API

This is not exactly a programming related question but it is closely related to developing so I think it is pertinent.
I´ve been charged in my work with developing an app with access to Facebook Messenger. I needed a Facebook Account and I didn´t want to use a personal one (and I don´t use Facebook anyway) so I created a new gmail account to use it to sign up in Facebook, as user and as a developer.
After a couple of days of work, having created the page, my webhook, done some tests, etc., and investing a good deal of work hours, my account appeared as disabled.
I have to admit a didn´t use much of real info on this account (I´m kind of allergic to disclosing personal information unless mandatory), and the account was new so I thought that maybe that was the reason (they don´t give you any).
So I tried again a second time with an account I had been using for years (just for logging in some sites, not much of real information there neither, as I say I don´t really use Facebook), and after a couple of days, same results, locked account.
I can´t stress enough I don´t use the API extensively, I just send some messages to another user I have added as one of the application developers so I can test (that other account is never blocked, by the way). It´s not like I am sending hundreds of messages or anything like it. And by the way, I have never been blocked while I was doing something (so I could indentify my wrongdoing). It just happened that at some point when I was going back to work (first hour in the morning, or after lunch for example) I tried to log in again and then I got the warning.
So I have tried a third time, this time I have given all my real information, reluctantly uploaded a personal picture, given all my data to Facebook (yikes!).
And after a couple of days: damn, same result. Blocked account. Work lost. They prompt you to upload a picture to check your Id, but to no avail (no answer yet, not even a notice of any kind) and they don´t give you absolutely any reason why the have blocked you.
And if I go to https://facebook.com/help/contact/260749603972907 to fill the form where they ask you to upload an ID then it says that the email doesn´t belong to a disabled account!
What is the unusual activity they have detected? What have I done wrong? Has someone experienced the same problem? Has someone got any clue of what it is that I could be doing wrong?
Because I don´t want to go through the whole process once again only to get blocked in a couple of days.
Thanks.
EDIT 1:
Ok, after checking again now it recognizes the account as a disabled one. I have gone to https://facebook.com/help/contact/260749603972907 to fill the form and I have uploaded my ID (even though I completely disagree with disclosing that kind of information).
Honestly, I don´t know what it means by "shortly". It´s been two days now and I have not received any kind of notification yet.
By the way, I haven´t received any kind of notification (mail, sms, anything) during any step of the process EVER. No one. Nothing. Not even an automatic email response. Plain absolute silence.
Honestly, if Facebook uses a security system like this, that lets hackers in while blocks legitimate users, creating false positives and making us lose many hours of work, without any reason or notification or explanation, then Facebook security is plain wrecked.
And I cannot do anything less than to strongly discourage any developer to use it if they can avoid it (what unfortunately I can´t).
EDIT 2:
After some days I regained access to my account again. Without any notification, I just tried again and now it worked (really good communication policy, Facebook, congratulations).
My App had disappeared, so I had to go through the whole process again. And after sending ONE message to the API, this again:
And once again the asked me to upload a picture of myself (I think they already have enough pictures of me to make an album).
This is just plain crazy.

rails beta request signup with social media sharing reward

I would like to build a simple beta request signup page where the user is rewarded with an earlier reward when he is sharing the link to the application as much as possible.
A solution like this is seeable on
trenvy.com
User enters email
User gets unique link with his unique code
User shares this link on every signup its a +1 count on him
An admin method throws out the users emails which have shared the link and brought the most people in. I want to use this email list to use in CampaignMonitor.
Anyone knows what could be a good way to achieve this? Or someone wrote such a thing or knows a git repo that has this feature implemented as is to take a look at and learn?
I have already coded a unique code generator for the app that makes unique codes of 10 chars.
Now only this social media sharing is a bit unclear to me on how to approach this in rails, any ideas on that? thx!
Something like this can be achieved pretty easily in any framework, so I think I'll provide a general answer first, and if any specific gems occur to me, I'll mention them:
1) The unique code part is easy, it's just a parameter in a controller that checks the validity of the code — this would be a unique code that's added to the user model for ease of verification and created when the user first enters his email address.
2) Every time the link is visited, it's parsed by the controller and saves an event (don't just increment a field if you want maximum data out of the interaction, you could save IP for country of origin, time of the page hit, etc), just count the click events for that user for his +1s
3) Just write a quick admin site (i used twitter bootstrap for this recently) that lets you see the user's who've interacted with the system and sort by shares, and you can use the createsend gem to add them to whatever list you like.
There are no specific gems I can think of that'll speed this process up, Devise is overkill, you don't really need an activity monitor gem since you're not storing much info, definitely twitter_bootstrap for speeding up building the admin interface. Heroku lets you add an Sendgrid as a plugin, so you're covered there for mail sending.
Am i missing anything in your requirements? Seriously though this should be a 2-4 day dev effort, nothing fancy here.

Questions on webhooks

Jeff Lindsay, who coined the term 'webhook', said that the difference between webhook and http callback is that webhooks are user-defined. I think I understand what he meant, but I was thinking about it and I asked myself, can webhooks be effectively used by regular users (I mean: non-developers)?
Usually people don't have a clue how the internet works, they don't know what http is, terms like URL, callback, or request-response don't say anything to them. I've heard that many people do not know the difference between a web browser and a web site, they think that internet really starts at google.com and they type in all urls in the google search box... I mean, what's the use of webhooks when you're not a developer?
Do you think services like AlertGrid make sense? It's a webhook consumer that you can configure to dispatch alerts (SMS, phone, email) either when the callback is NOT received in x amount of time, or when the received data meets user-defined condition, plus it does some data visualization. We wanted it to make webhooks usable for non-developers. But still it requires an initial integration by someone who at least knows how to configure the source to send the webhook events. In many cases it only takes pasting an url to a textbox, but it seems to be beyond the skills of a typical user.
So, are the webhook doomed to be used by software developers only, or is there a chance that millions of Facebook or Twitter users will start making use of them somehow?
I think that something implemented using Webhooks can be made very user friendly.
Suppose Stack Exchange allowed users to define a webhook that would be notified whenever you earned a badge. You could supply a custom URL, or there could be simple buttons to click that would set it up for your Facebook or Twitter account. It could be as simple as the Facebook Like button.
YES I think this is a great idea. It's actually something I designed in my head a couple months ago and didn't think the product existed.
Webhooks are extremely powerful and having a 'service bus' aggregate/manage/dispatch these callbacks is extremely compelling to me.
I think that we are a long way from the general public consuming webhooks in any sort of meaningful way but I don't see why not. I remember when RSS was a 'developer' only technology.
Thanks for the link. I'll be digging in more this weekend.