By snufkin on

Just recently became public that Facebook, the popular socialnetworking thing just opened their API. Anyone developing services with Drupal could find an interaction with Facebook benefitial, potentially increasing the customer's, user's range over Facebook users too.

The potential usefullness is promising: imagine common login, integrated friends (instead of modules/buddylist), integrated profiles etc. Now imagine a simple webshop, that even has a facebook group, providing you with the ability to immediately log in to the service with your facebook login, write reviews, or read reviews about the service's quality from your friends (whom opinion you trust) and so on. Got the picture?

Unfortunately I am already overbooked for the summer, due to some silly coding stuff, but other developers, who see fantasy in this project could start writing it, providing all of us with a great free tool to improve our webservices.

If you are interested, be sure to check the references: http://developers.facebook.com/. You can count me in the brainstorming.

Comments

ChrisKennedy’s picture

ChrisKennedy commented

There is a facebook module already fyi, although it's only for authentication. http://drupal.org/project/facebook

It could be a good starting point though. You're right that this would be a great module to have; I might even have some interest in helping out as I have done some automated facebook screen-scraping in the past.

snufkin’s picture

snufkin commented

thanks for pointing that out, i should've done a module check :/

I hope with the API opening this module will be improved, as i see the last dev version was born on February.

snufkin’s picture

snufkin commented

i found an interesting article in the topic on vecosys.

Parts from the article, and as well of the Facebook Developers Terms of Service

1. Facebook can limit you or terminate you at any time at their sole discretion (Section A.3)
2. Facebook reserve the right to impose fees at time and in any manner (Section 3)
3. Facebook can copy and distribute your Application, and analyse the content in order to target advertising (Section 4)
4. Facebook may create similar applications to yours, with no obligation to you (Sectition 4)
5. You can’t use any name or domain name address containing ‘facebook’, even at the third level, eg.g “facebook.xxx.com” (Section 6. C)
6. Be careful what ID you use for your developer account - IDs can’t be transferred or sold on, but nor do there seem to be corporate IDs. (Section 7)
7. Facebook can change the Terms and Conditions at any time, your only recourse if you don’t like this is to STOP USING THE SERVICE

James Andres’s picture

James Andres commented

Hello,

I'm building a Facebook API module for a project I'm working on. Since it would probably be a useful module for a lot of people we will likely release it to the community (I say likely, because I'm always nervous to give 100% guarantees on software development ;-)

To fit the project's requirements, our module will be a programmatic API, rather than having a lot of front end features. The UI features will be added by modules that harness the facebook_api module (this is the approach taken by audio module, and a lot of other core mods).

Again, this is a programmatic API ... so in that context:

  • What features would be useful to you?
  • What FB services do you think would be most useful for Drupal devs?

No promises on what we can include in the first release ;-)

Thoughts?

James Andres

hound’s picture

hound commented

Massively support this. Great idea.

James Andres’s picture

James Andres commented

Thanks, I just hope I have the time properly build it out and release it to the community :-) Hope to have a pre-alpha build posted soon.

Cheers,

James Andres

snufkin’s picture

snufkin commented

I would personally find a share content option the most useful. I have a travel community website for which I would like to offer the option to share the reviews of places on Facebook with friends. This is a feature probably many drupal websites could use.

btw i just discovered, there is a group on the topic here: http://groups.drupal.org/facebook-api

James Andres’s picture

James Andres commented

Thanks for that link snufkin! I wasn't aware that group existed.

Cheers,

James Andres

Lead Developer on Project Opus
www.projectopus.com

James Andres’s picture

James Andres commented

I've posted the pre-pre-alpha copy of my Facebook API module here.

Check it out, let me know if it's useful to anyone.

DISCLAIMER: This is NOT "fully functional" code. It is for developer eyes only. It's essentially a brainstorming project at this point.

James Andres

Lead Developer on Project Opus
www.projectopus.com

yphish’s picture

yphish commented

This is a great start to a much needed component!

OT: In attempting the reverse, I'm creating a Facebook App that needs to access data contained within Drupal. What is the best/easiest way to access the nodes contained in Drupal from an external application. Is there a way to expose them as PHP objects for other software to consume? Is there a way of exposing this information as a web-service?

Thanks,
Shawn.

levelos’s picture

levelos commented

I'm also working on an app where I want to integrate Drupal content/features into a Face Book app. Still looking into the best approach, but the NewsCloud app which they released might be a good starting point if you haven't seen it. http://groups.drupal.org/node/444

I'm leaning towards exposing Drupal content and some functions via a web service and then consuming that via FB. I'll definitely post what I find/do and would appreciate and help/tips.

Lev

Lev Tsypin
CEO and Co-Founder at ThinkShout

Dave Cohen’s picture

Dave Cohen commented

lmtsypin, that link in your post doesn't lead to much. Is it the right URL?

I think the proper way to integrate with facebook is essentially to treat FBML as another theme. Allowing you to do anything on a canvas page that you could do on any other drupal page. It's not nearly that simple, of course. But I've managed to put something together:
http://apps.facebook.com/drupalforfacebook.