Apart from creating a useful and fun product, one of the goals of this project is to explore the problems and possibilities of designing an ecosystem of things both physical and digital that all talk to each other. On the digital side, one of the possibilities of reaching a lot of users as well as making use of existing social connections is to build a Facebook app. Looking into this, I was made aware that within the context of the Facebook Walled Garden, there’s almost what you could call an ecosystem in itself of various points where the app could be made a part of the user experience.

Now, there’s nothing really new in this post for anyone who’s even just a little used to using Facebook (how many quiz-app requests have you blocked today?), but in any case you might not have noticed how many options there are for you as a developer to promote your app and for your users to interact with it. Making sensible use of these options is probably a good way to attract more users while avoiding to annoy them.

Hooking into the wall feed & profile page

When you authorize an app, you often get a couple of questions about where your app is allowed to place content. First, you have the profile box placed in the sidebar of your profile page. Sometimes you get asked if the application can publish items in your feed as well, which means that the app can post messages on your own wall. Apart from generated messages from the app itself, these feed items can consist of specially formatted wall posts created via what is called feed forms within your app. These can be posted either to your own profile or that of a friend.

The Publisher box for my favourite football team, extended

Another way of tapping into the user’s feed is to create what is known as a publisher from your app, which means that there is a special button in the regular feed-posting form that allows you to quickly post stuff related to your app usage.

Other parts of the profile page

Apart from the more obvious parts of the profile page listed above, there’s a bunch of places in the users profile where your application might interact with the user(s). You can let the user place an application tab in their profile that lets them interact with the app in a more direct way, similar to the canvas page (more on that in a minute) but “closer to home”.

There’s also a boxes tab that lets you pick and change around what profile boxes are displayed on the profile page. Apart from boxes in the sidebar, there’s also info sections that display information from the app in your personal information on the profile.

Access to the app can also be promoted via application bookmarks at the bottom of the screen, or via the application menu. Finally, you can interact with your applications privacy settings via the general privacy settings for you profile.

The Canvas and app directory

To enable your users to find the app itself, you need an application directory entry where your app is presented, leading to your apps about page with descriptive text and images – this is where you pull the user in and lets them know what your app does, so wording and imagery is important. When the user decides to enable your app, they get to interact with its canvas page, this is where the main full page interface for your app lives. The canvas page and the application tab mentioned previously is where you have the most screen real estate to play with, so if your app needs any bigger graphic user interface or uses a lot of images, forms or text, this is probably where you’ll place it.

Alerts & requests

The final pieces of the puzzle are the little things that sort of pull your users in when they already have enabled your app – or pulls new users in via social connections. Various actions from within your app can let you send requests to other users. I’m thinking this is one of the places where you need to be careful not to spam people. Another way of letting other users know what’s going on with your app is to send notifications from your app to the inbox of a user. In that case, the user must have authorized to receive these via their privacy settings. I’m also pretty sure you can send notifications in the form of a little “blip” in the notification box in the bottom menu of a users page, even though it’s not listed in the developer wiki.

Phew! That’s a lot.

Yup. Even if I’ve come across all these smaller or bigger integration/interaction points as a user, I was actually quite surprised at the sheer amount when I started to put my head around building a Facebook app. There are several places in the developer wiki that list these from various perspectives, and it felt like a good idea to get to know them a little better by summarizing what I found in a blog post. At the time of writing, we (the team working on the electricity meter project) are undecided on whether to put any big functionality into a Facebook app, but knowing what means of reaching and interacting with users are available really helps in establishing boundaries and making the best use of that option.