Ever have a new product that you have to release slowly, yet you are constantly asked to describe it? What if the current design and UI is changing so rapidly that screenshots and screen casts really won't be representative of the product? Illustrate your concept like you would on a whiteboard or piece of paper, and see if you can get your point across! Hope you like the video.
Just read the tc article. Looks really promising! A nice twist to Facebook event checkins + Foursquare checkins and blogging all in one. Right up there with what's really trending and working out. Excited to use it when it hits the California ;)
Good question. There's a few things going on here. If a brand new user comes and you store his initial permissions and also setup the web hook to get updates on user permission changes (such as if she removes offline_access from facebook.com/settings/?tab=applications) then you can just query your backend (which would store this somewhere). Then you won't ever have to do this.
What if, for example, this is a pure client side application that doesn't store anything in a backend database? Everytime a user comes to your site, you can check to see if local storage has anything sure, but if they're on a new computer or have cleared their storage, you're in the dark.
Oh, an edge case: If facebook doesn't call your web hook to update your db on the newest permissions before a user revists your site, you may have some bad consequences.
Another edge case: say you have millions of users, only 1000 regularly visit the site. You would have webhooks for a million users updating your backend, rather than just confirming permissions with facebook whenever they arrive to your site. The hop to facebook is probably just as fast, if not faster, than checking in with your own backend. Let Facebook take the brute of the traffic ;)
As a facebook hacker, I'd be interesting in seeing what the instructional popups you made look like.
I think asking for the bare minimum as you need it is absolutely the way to go as tons of people bounce out of apps that need all kinds of permissions before they get to even see the app. I get sick of seeing apps that want offline publish access before I even know what the app is because the developers are lazy and just request all permissions available.
I'll definitely be able to show you soon. We're finishing up a few final touches on our beta, but signup now and we'll send you a beta invite asap! We should be ready on Monday. http://feedtopic.com has a signup on the beta roadblock.
In the meantime, I can give you a quick description of what we have going on: each link that requires an extra permission not asked up front has a listener that will check what permissions are available. If it's missing a permission, we actually trigger a Facebox (from @defunkt's facebook lib). The Facebox defaults are really clean. Light overlay, slight shadow, nothing fancy. We put in different messages for different actions, one for example: "Yes you can like someone's post from FeedTopic! We need a new permission from Facebook to do this for you. Click the 'Add Permission' button to bring up Facebook's Permissions page". We have a button that looks SUPER clickable, like if you didn't click it you'd feel horrible because it has nice css gradients and looks like it's 3D. Underneath we have a message that says: "We won't publish anything without your direct permission to any part of Facebook, promise". Once you click the button, it will show you the FB permission prompt. yes, it's multiple steps, but it's clean and makes people feel really confident. BTW, liking something on feedtopic is probably the last thing people are going to the site for ;) It's just a small piece of info I can give away for now before the launch.
Two quick updates I'm going to put in the blog post: Know that the server times are in UTC, so your cron schedule needs to be in UTC. Also you need the RAILS_ENV to be set to production in the scheduler as well as the worker.
Great product! You've basically built something every company tries to build when first launching a product.
Ever think about a badging system to go along with this? I mention this because this is similar to what we built to use on Fanvibe for awarding users virtual goods and real life deals on tickets etc.
