Facebook PHP Tutorial

July 31st, 2007 · 79 Comments

Facebook Is The New Black.

Everyone is talking about Facebook and their new Application Platform:

• Techcrunch - Facebook Launches Facebook Platform; They are the Anti-MySpace
• Mashable - Facebook Powertools: 150+ Apps, Scripts and Add-ons for Facebook
• Digg - The Impact of Facebook’s Platform
• Mashable - Facebook Platform: 30+ Awesome Applications for Facebook
• Valleywag - Developers, beware. Facebook really is the new Microsoft.
• Facebook’s Blog Post on the Facebook Platform
• Inside Facebook - Hottest Facebook Apps: July 28th

And I have to admit I think it’s pretty cool too. So I decided to create an application that uses the Facebook Platform. I’m writing the application in PHP and I thought it might be useful for others to know how to write their own Facebook applications with PHP. So here we are.

What Will I Learn?

I will cover the basics of using the Facebook PHP library and how to get your application started, including:

1. Installing The Facebook Developer Application
2. Downloading The Facebook PHP Client Library
3. Creating Your Application
4. Hello Facebook! Example
5. FBML - Facebook Markup Language
6. Using the Facebook API

Getting Started As A Facebook Developer

The first thing you need of course is a Facebook account. You can sign up for Facebook at www.facebook.com. Once you have your account you’ll need to install the Facebook developer application. This little tool will allow you to generate your application profile and get an API key (more on that later). Once you’ve logged into Facebook visit: www.facebook.com/developers/ or click below to install the developer application:

Add The Facebook Developer Application.

PHP Facebook API Client Library

Facebook has created a nice php library that allows you to use their API without writing a lot of extra code. You can grab the PHP version of the library at developers.facebook.com/resources.php. Download the ‘PHP (4 and 5) Client Library’.

Once you’ve downloaded the library unzip it into a folder that is accessible by your PHP scripts. So you would have something like /php_include_directory/facebook/ and in that folder you will have the entire Facebook PHP Client Library (3 folders: client, footprints, php4client). I’m using PHP5 so my examples will be using the “client” directory of the library. The footprints folder is an example application.

Creating Your Application Profile And API Key

Facebook requires that you register each application you make. Once you’ve logged into Facebook and installed the developer application go to the developer panel (or click here). Inside the developer application click “Set Up New Application”.

Choose a name for your application. This is important because it’s what users will see when they are browsing the application directory. Currently the name field is the only thing used when searching for applications. So it’s doubly important at this point.

Click on “Optional Fields”. Then fill out the Callback Url with the location of your script. This is the public URL on your webserver where the Facebook application will be.

Next fill out the “Canvas Page URL”. This is your application URL within Facebook. For example if the application was called “Makebeta Is Cool” then the application URL could be: “makebeta” which would make the full URL: http://apps.facebook.com/makebeta/.

Check Yes for Can your application be added on Facebook?

You should check the Developer Mode checkbox so that no one can add your application until you are done working on it.

Under Integration Points fill out Side Nav URL with the full Canvas Page URL. In the example above it would be http://apps.facebook.com/makebeta/. This allows users to add your application to their Facebook left side bar navigation.

All of these settings can be changed after the application has been created. But it’s a good idea not to change the Canvas Page URL or Name once you have users that have installed your application.

Further Reading: Starting your First Facebook App: Demystifying Application Form Field by Field

Get the API Key and Secret. You should now see your application listed with a unique API Key and Secret code. You’ll use these within your application.

Hello Facebook!

Let’s create a really simple first application that just says hello to the current Facebook user. Here’s the code for the Hello Facebook! application:

require_login();



/* now we will say:

Hello USER_NAME! Welcome to my first application! */

?>



Hello ' useyou='false' possessive='true' />! Welcome to my first application!



Debug:" . print_r($facebook,true) . "

";

?>

So what happens when a user hits the Canvas Page URL (from the example it would be: http://apps.facebook.com/makebeta/)? The require_login() call will produce a screen like this for the user:

If you change require_login() to require_add() the user will get a page that looks like this:

After the user logs into or adds the application they will get the canvas page with the “Hello…” text. It should look something like this:

Facebook Markup Language - FBML

Facebook has provided a bunch of built in tags that will render dynamic data inside your application. All you have to do is include the tags with the correct parameters. In the example above the fb:name tag is used to generate the user’s name on the canvas page. fb:name has a couple of parameters, one of which is uid. In the example above we set uid = $fb_user which is the unique ID of the current user. There are lots of FBML tags you can use, check them all out at: developers.facebook.com/documentation.php?doc=fbml

Facebook API REST-based Interface

The Facebook Client Library provides you with an easy to use wrapper for the Facebook API REST interface. All of the API calls are available under the $facebook->api_client object (after you initiate the $facebook object). Many of the calls will require that the user has either added or logged into the application. Here’s an example call that would retrieve the user’s About Me text from their profile:

$fb_user = $facebook->user;

$about = $facebook->api_client->users_getInfo($fb_user,'about_me');

There are a number of API calls, and a list of them can be found here:
developers.facebook.com/documentation.php

Resources and Further Reading

These are very helpful pieces of information that I highly recommend reading before you get too far into making your Facebook application.

• Basic Facebook Application Architecture
• How URLs Are Handled Within An Application
• Understanding Your Callback Page

And of course the official documentation / developer site:

• Facebook Developers Site
• Facebook Developers Wiki

Other Facebook tutorials and how-to articles:

• Tucows - Getting Started With Facebook Application Development
• 10 Things That Would Have Been Nice to Know When Starting My Facebook Application
• Developing with the Facebook Platform and PHP

(CBS) Are you on Facebook yet? The site is up to 60 million users so far, with a projection of 200 million by the end of the year.

If you're not on Facebook, here's how it works: you set up a profile page with details about yourself and then decide who gets to see it. Friends use their pages to share personal news, exchange photos, team up on political causes, or just play long-distance Scrabble. It can be a useful tool or an addictive waste of time. Either way, Facebook is having a dramatic impact on the World Wide Web and it's estimated to be worth $15 billion.

As Lesley Stahl reports, sitting atop this growing company and directing an Internet revolution is a young, geeky computer programmer who created the site only four years ago.

---

The face of Facebook is Mark Zuckerberg, the mogul who's guiding its extraordinary growth. What everyone wants to know is: Is he old enough to be running a company some people say is the biggest thing since Google?

"I'm 23 right now," Zuckerberg tells Stahl when asked how old he is.

"And you're running this huge company," Stahl remarks.

"It's not that big," Zuckerberg says.

During her visit to Facebook's headquarters, Zuckerberg helped Stahl set up her own Facebook page, with a profile of her likes and dislikes. They added her friends and family, and within a few minutes, she got a friend request.

"Here's a guy I haven't talked to in two years and I'm so thrilled to hear from him," Stahl remarks.

This is why so many find the site addictive. In a world with no cell phone or e-mail directories, Facebook has become a way to find lost friends.

"It used to be the case, like you'd switch jobs. And then maybe you wouldn't keep in touch with all the people that you knew from that old job. Just 'cause it was too hard," Zuckerberg explains. "But one of the things that Facebook does is it makes it really easy to just stay in touch with all these people."

Of course, if someone tries to "friend" you, you can ignore them. And privacy settings allow you to deny access to your page say, to your boss or your parents.

Facebook's headquarters in downtown Palo Alto look like a dorm room; the 400 employees, who get free food and laundry, show up late, stay late, and party really late.

Zuckerberg, who's made the cover of Newsweek and is reportedly worth $3 billion, sits at a desk like the other software engineers, writing computer code.

"Have you changed your lifestyle? You don't look like you're buyin' really expensive clothes," Stahl asks Zuckerberg, who showed up to the interview in a sweatshirt and sandals.

"No, I'm not buying really expensive clothes," Zuckerberg replies, laughing.

"Are you buying things that you would be…," Stahl asks.

"Yeah. No, I have a little, like one bedroom apartment with a mattress on the floor. That's where I live," Zuckerberg says.

Kara Swisher, who used to write about Silicon Valley for The Wall Street Journal and now has a blog, All Things Digital, has called him "The Toddler CEO."

"What do you think it's done to him, as a person, to be 23 years old…," Stahl asks.

"Well, I think it's hard. I think when all of a sudden you're the smartest person in the world, and you're the meal ticket for everybody, and this is the big hit. This is the new Google at this point," Swisher says. "And so Mark is under a lot of pressure, because everybody wants something from him."

Like the founders of Google, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Mark Zuckerberg is looked up to in Silicon Valley as a visionary.

"You seem to be replacing Larry and Sergey as the people out here who everyone's talking about," Stahl remarks. Zuckerberg doesn't reply, only stares at her at length.

"You're just staring at me," she adds.

"Is that a question?" Zuckerberg asks.

We were warned that he can be awkward and reluctant to talk about himself, so we turned for help to his Facebook page, which says he's a Harvard alum.

"You're not a Harvard alum," Stahl remarks, looking at his own list of networks.

"That's true. We don't have a setting for dropout," Zuckerberg explains.

Social metworking sites are such a hit to anyone and everyone who's engrossed in the cyberworld. It's a chance for people to get into contact with old friends and get to know others as well. The most popular of these includes Myspace, Facebook, and Friendster.
In the Philippines, the definite most popular one would be, Friendster. I had my Friendster account opened around 5 years ago, back in 2003.
However, saturation period has been reached and now, i only open my friendster tro check on messages, and friend requests, and testimonials. But for me to pimp it up (or if you're a girl, glam it up) would not be an option. I have just grown tired of this craze.
So now, there's only one social networking site that I keep on updating. Just Facebook. Even my Myspace's hardly updated!

Suzanna is spending too much time on Facebook". Yes, it's the latest community site's craze that I am sucked into. Recently, I was invited by a friend (more likely as an auto inclusion evite through Facebook) to join the latest community site Facebook.

To me, what started as just submitting my particulars to be a member and in order for me just login and accept my friend's invite had me hooked. Yes. I am hooked on Facebook.

Facebook is one of the popular social network after MySpace. Unlike MySpace, which allows customizations for all areas, Facebook does not have much customizations for your Profile and are limited. But still you can do some customizations to your profile. Facebook Expressions is one such application which can give a new look to your Facebook profile and layout.

Expressions are similar to wallpaper for your Facebook profile. The Expressions application is added through Facebook and allows you to display eye catching designs (Expressions) on your profile.

How to add expressions?

1. Navigate to Facebook Expressions and and install the application on your Facebook (you need to login to add the application).

2. Once you install the application you can come back to the main website where you can then find an Expression you like by browsing the categories on the left.

3. After finding an Expression you like, click the “Add to Profile” button. This will take you to your Facebook profile where you will see your newly applied Expression.

You can see Apple expression on my Facebook profile.There are hundreds of expressions with which you can customize your profile.

It is known that you can’t customize your Facebook layout beyond recognition like you do in MySpace for example. It have very much advantages because it makes it more solid and helps protect your eyes from artwork that was created by some monkey without taste. But of course anyone of us would like to separate their personality from the crowd and by the first look Facebook don’t give you such possibility.

But if you want something you can find it! First sign that you want to customize your virtual life at Facebook is that you are reading this article and of course I will give you an option to add a little personality to Facebook.

Cool guys from Facebook Expressions web site have created plugin that lets you to add graphic images to Facebook. At their site you can find nice designed pictures and with one click add them to your Facebook profile page. You are able to create your own images also - they will need to go thought approval process but if your idea is great you will be famous! :)

If you know more ways to customize Facebook - leave comment below!

by : Nick O'Neill

Everyday I receive an email from somebody about how their account was hacked, how a friend tagged them in the photo and they want a way to avoid it, as well as a number of other complications related to their privacy on Facebook. Over the weekend one individual contacted me to let me know that he would be removing me as a friend from Facebook because he was “going to make a shift with my Facebook use - going to just mostly family stuff.”

Perhaps he was tired of receiving my status updates or perhaps he didn’t want me to view photos from his personal life. Whatever the reason for ending our Facebook friendship, I figured that many people would benefit from a thorough overview on how to protect your privacy on Facebook. Below is a step by step process for protecting your privacy.

1. Use Your Friend Lists

I can’t tell you how many people are not aware of their friend lists. For those not aware of what friend lists are, Facebook describes them as a feature which allows “you to create private groupings of friends based on your personal preferences. For example, you can create a Friend List for your friends that meet for weekly book club meetings. You can create Friend Lists for all of your organizational needs, allowing you to quickly view friends by type and send messages to your lists.”

There are a few very important things to remember about friend lists:

• You can add each friend to more than one friend group
• Friend groups should be used like “tags” as used elsewhere around the web
• Friend Lists can have specific privacy policies applied to them

I’ll touch on each of the things listed above in more detail later. A typical setup for groups would be “Friends”, “Family”, and “Professional”. These three groups can then be used to apply different privacy policies. For example, you may want your friends to see photos from the party you were at last night, but you don’t want your family or professional contacts to see those photos.

Using friend lists is also extremely useful for organizing your friends if you have a lot of them. For instance I have about 20 friend lists and I categorize people by city (New York, San Francisco, D.C., Tel Aviv, etc), where I met them (conferences, past co-workers, through this blog), and my relationship with them (professional, family, social, etc).

You can configure your friend lists by visiting the friends area of your Facebook.

2. Remove Yourself From Facebook Search Results

My mom is a teacher and one of the first things she asked me when she joined Facebook is how she could make sure her students couldn’t see that she was on the site. Understandably my mom doesn’t want her middle school students to know what she’s up to in her personal life. There are numerous reasons that individuals don’t want their information to show up in search results on Facebook, and it’s simple to turn off your public visibility.

How to Remove Yourself From Facebook Search Results
Now that you’ve decided that you would like to remove yourself from Facebook’s search results, here’s how to do it:

1. Visit your search privacy settings page
2. Under “Search Visibility” select “Only Friends” (Remember, doing so will remove you from Facebook search results, so make sure you want to be removed totally. Otherwise, you can select another group, such as “My Networks and Friends” which I believe is the default.)
3. Click “Save Changes”

By default, Facebook makes your presence visible to the network you are in. Frequently, people aren’t aware of their visibility, so this is one of the first settings that users wish to modify. By selecting “Customize” from the search visibility drop down you can make your settings even more granular.

3. Remove Yourself From Google

Facebook gets A TON of traffic from displaying user profiles in search engines. Not all of your profile is displayed though. Currently the information displayed in the search profile is limited to: your profile picture, a list of your friends, a link to add you as a friend, a link to send you a message, and a list of up to approximately 20 fan pages that you are a member of.

For some people, being displayed in the search engines is a great way to let people get in contact with you, especially if you don’t have an existing website. Facebook also tends to rank high in the search results, so if you want to be easy to find, making your search profile can be a great idea. Many people don’t want any of their information to be public though.

By visiting the same search privacy settings page listed in the previous step, you can control the visibility of your public search listing which is visible to Google and other search engines. You can turn off your public search listing by simply unchecking the box next to the phrase “Create a public search listing for me and submit it for search engine indexing” as pictured in the image below.

4. Avoid the Infamous Photo/Video Tag Mistake

This is the classic Facebook problem. You let loose for a few hours one night (or day) and photos (or videos) of the moment are suddenly posted for all to view, not just your close friends who shared the moment with you. The result can be devastating. Some have been fired from work after incriminating photos/videos were posted for the boss to see. For others, randomly tagged photos/videos have ended relationships.

At the least, a tagged photo/video can result in personal embarrassment. So how do you prevent the infamous tagged photo or video from showing up in all of your friends news feeds? It’s pretty simple. First visit your profile privacy page and modify the setting next to “Photos Tagged of You”. Select the option which says “Customize…” and a box like the one pictured below will pop up.

Select the option “Only Me” and then “None of My Networks” if you would like to keep all tagged photos private. If you’d like to make tagged photos visible to certain users you can choose to add them in the box under the “Some Friends” option. In the box that displays after you select “Some Friends” you can type either individual friends or friend lists.

5. Protect Your Albums

Just because you’ve uploaded photos doesn’t mean that you’ve accurately tagged every photo correctly. This setting is more of a reminder than anything else. Frequently people will turn of their tagged photo visibility to certain friend lists yet keep their photo albums public to the world. If you are trying to make all your photos invisible you must do so on an album by album basis.

There is a specific Photos Privacy page from which you can manually configure the visibility of each album (as pictured below). This is an extremely useful configuration option and I highly recommend that you take advantage of it. This way you can store your photos indefinitely on Facebook yet ensure that the only people that can view your photos are the ones who you really want to see them.

6. Prevent Stories From Showing Up in Your Friends’ News Feeds

Oh, did you really just break up with your girlfriend? I’m sorry to hear that. I’m sure all of your friends and business contacts are also sorry to hear that. I can’t tell you how many awkward relationship status changes I’ve seen. The most regular one I’ve seen recently is when an attractive female ends their relationship and numerous guys hop on the opportunity to console her.

I’ve also seen the end of marriages, as well as weekly relationship status changes as individuals try to determine where their relationship stands with their significant other. My personal policy is to not display a relationship status, but many like to make a public statement out of their relationship. For those individuals, it can be a smart move to hedge against future disasters.

There are a number of ways to control how your relationship status is displayed. The first thing that most people should do is uncheck the box next to “Remove Relationship Status” in the News Feed and Wall Privacy page. In the rare instance that a relationship does uncomfortably end, you can avoid making things more uncomfortable by avoiding a friend notification about it.

Second, your relationship status falls within your “Basic Information” section of your profile. You can control who can see your basic information next to the “Basic Information” setting on the Profile Privacy page. Keep in mind that other relevant profile information like your gender, birth date, networks, and other settings are visible within your basic information section.

Making your basic information completely invisible to friends probably isn’t a good idea, but removing the news feed stories about relationship changes most likely is.

7. Protect Against Published Application Stories

This one is a little more tricky to manage but I’ll explain the issue at hand. Frequently when you add an application, a news feed item is immediately published to your profile. One way to get instantly embarrassed is to visit the “Have Sex!” application (found here). This application has no purpose besides telling your friends that you are interested in having sex with them. Without taking any action, the application will post a news feed story to your profile which says the equivalent of “Nick just published to the world that he is having sex!”

This is surely something that none of your professional contacts if any of your contacts are interested in seeing (honestly I’m a bit confused about that application, but that’s a different story). That’s why it’s important to monitor what takes place after you install an application on Facebook. Once you install an application you should visit your profile to ensure that no embarrassing notification has been posted to your profile.

More often then not, nothing will be posted but there are many applications on the platform unfortunately that publish stories without you knowing it. There are two ways to avoid having this happen: don’t visit applications or scan your profile every time that you do. Ultimately you shouldn’t be concerned about applications that you’ve built a trusted relationship with but any new applications could potentially post embarrassing notifications.

8. Make Your Contact Information Private

I personally use Facebook for professional and personal use and it can frequently become overwhelming. That’s why I’ve taken the time to outline these ten privacy protection steps. One of the first things I did when I started approving friend requests from people that I hadn’t built a strong relationship with, was make my contact information visible only to close contacts.

The contact information is my personal email and phone number. It’s a simple thing to set but many people forget to do it. Frequently people we don’t know end up contacting us and we have no idea how they got our contact information. Your contact privacy can be edited right from your profile. If you have chosen to enter this information, you should see a “Contact Information” area under the “Info” tab in your profile.

If it displays, you simply click “Edit” and then a screen like the one pictured below will show up.

For each contact item that you have in your profile you should set custom privacy settings (as pictured below) so that contacts that you aren’t close to don’t have access to your phone number and/or email. It’s a small change but it can save you the hassle of being pestered by people you don’t know well. Also, protecting your privacy is generally a good practice to get in the habit of doing.

As a side note, this is a great area to take advantage of friend lists. By getting in the habit of grouping your friends, you can ensure that you are navigating Facebook safely through privacy settings that are attached to your friend lists.

9. Avoid Embarrassing Wall Posts

Just because you use Facebook for business doesn’t mean your friends do. That’s why once in a while a friend of yours will come post something embarrassing or not necessarily “work friendly” and it can end up having adverse effects. That’s why Facebook has provided you with the ability to customize your wall postings visibility. You can also control which friends can post on your wall. There are two places you can control these things.

Adjust Wall Posting Visibility

Within your profile page you can control who can view wall postings made by your friends. To do so, click on the “Settings” icon on the wall in your profile page. Next, find the box pictured in the image above and adjust the setting which says “Who can see posts made by friends?” I’d suggest using a strategy similar to the one outlined in the previous step regarding contact information.

Control Who Can Post to Your Wall
In addition to controlling who can view wall postings published by your friends, you also want to control which friends can post on your wall. Not everybody needs to do this, but occasionally you simply want to prevent some people from posting on your page. If you visit the Profile Privacy settings page, there is a section labeled “Wall Posts”.

From this area you can completely disable your friends’ ability to post on your wall. You can also select specific friend lists that can post on your wall. Personally, I don’t really care who can post on my wall but I can understand the need to control who can see those wall postings. If you want to limit who can post wall posts on your profile, this is where you can do it.

10. Keep Your Friendships Private

While it’s fun to show off that you have hundreds or thousands of friends on Facebook, some of your friends don’t want to live public lives. That’s why it’s often a good policy to turn off your friends’ visibility to others. I’ve had a number of individuals visit my profile and then selectively pick off friends that are relevant to them for marketing purposes, or other reasons.

Whatever the reason they are doing it, just know that they are … it’s part of what makes Facebook so addictive: the voyeuristic nature. Also, your friends are frequently visible to the public through search engines and exposing this information can ultimately present a security risk. To modify the visibility of your friends, visit the Profile Privacy page.

Navigate down to the setting which says “Friends” and then modify the setting to whatever is right for you.

Conclusion

These are just ten ways that you can protect your privacy on Facebook. While there are a few other small things to keep in mind, these ten settings are most important. Keep in mind that while you may have turned off the visibility of many profile sections, there is no way to prevent all photos or videos from being visible if friends of yours make the images visible.

The best way to prevent embarrassing items from showing up on Facebook in the future is to not make bad judgements in your personal life. We’re all human though and being completely paranoid about every choice you make is probably not the best way to live your life. Be aware of what privacy settings are available and be conscious of what your friends may be publishing about you.

While you may not want to configure all of the privacy settings outlined, simply knowing how to do so is a great step in the right direction. By following the 10 settings listed above you are well on your way to an embarrassment free future on Facebook!

source : http://www.allfacebook.com/

Facebook is a free-access social networking website that is operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc.^[1] Users can join networks organized by city, workplace, school, and region to connect and interact with other people. People can also add friends and send them messages, and update their personal profiles to notify friends about themselves. The website's name refers to the paper facebooks depicting members of a campus community that some US colleges and preparatory schools give to incoming students, faculty, and staff as a way to get to know other people on campus.

Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook with fellow computer science major students and his roommates Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes while he was a student at Harvard University.^[4] Website membership was initially limited to Harvard students, but was expanded to other colleges in the Boston area, the Ivy League, and Stanford University. It later expanded further to include any university student, then high school students, and, finally, to anyone aged 13 and over. The website currently has more than 200 million active users worldwide.^[5]

Facebook has met with some controversy over the past few years. It has been blocked intermittently in several countries including Syria^[6] and Iran,^[7] although Iran later unblocked Facebook in 2009.^[8] It has also been banned at many places of work to discourage employees from wasting time using the service.^[9] Privacy has also been an issue, and it has been compromised several times. Facebook is also facing several lawsuits from a number of Zuckerberg's former classmates, who claim that Facebook had stolen their source code and other intellectual property.

History

The Facebook on February 12, 2004

The advent of Facebook came about as a spin-off of a Harvard University version of Hot or Not called Facemash.^[10] Mark Zuckerberg, while attending Harvard as a sophomore, concocted Facemash on October 28, 2003. Zuckerberg was blogging about a girl and trying to think of something to do to get her off his mind.^[11] According to The Harvard Crimson, Facemash "used photos compiled from the online facebooks of nine Houses, placing two next to each other at a time and asking users to choose the 'hotter' person." To accomplish this, Zuckerberg hacked into the protected areas of Harvard's computer network and copied the house's private dormitory ID images. "Perhaps Harvard will squelch it for legal reasons without realizing its value as a venture that could possibly be expanded to other schools (maybe even ones with good-looking people ... )," Zuckerberg wrote in his personal blog. "But one thing is certain, and it’s that I’m a jerk for making this site. Oh well. Someone had to do it eventually ... "^[12] The site was quickly forwarded to several campus group list-servers but was shut down a few days later by the Harvard administration. Zuckerberg was charged by the administration with breach of security, violating copyrights and violating individual privacy and faced expulsion, but ultimately the charges were dropped.^[13]

The following semester, Zuckerberg founded "The Facebook", originally located at thefacebook.com, on February 4, 2004.^[14] “Everyone’s been talking a lot about a universal face book within Harvard,” Zuckerberg told The Harvard Crimson. “I think it’s kind of silly that it would take the University a couple of years to get around to it. I can do it better than they can, and I can do it in a week.”^[15] Membership was initially restricted to students of Harvard College, and within the first month, more than half the undergraduate population at Harvard was registered on the service.^[16] Eduardo Saverin (business aspects), Dustin Moskovitz (programmer), Andrew McCollum (graphic artist), and Chris Hughes soon joined Zuckerberg to help promote the website. In March 2004, Facebook expanded to Stanford, Columbia, and Yale.^[17] This expansion continued when it opened to all Ivy League and Boston area schools, and gradually most universities in Canada and the United States.^[18] Facebook incorporated in the summer of 2004 and the entrepreneur Sean Parker, who had been informally advising Zuckerberg, became the company's president.^[19] In June 2004, Facebook moved its base of operations to Palo Alto, California.^[17] The company dropped The from its name after purchasing the domain name facebook.com in 2005 for $200,000.^[20]

Facebook launched a high school version in September 2005, which Zuckerberg called the next logical step.^[21] At that time, high school networks required an invitation to join.^[22] Facebook later expanded membership eligibility to employees of several companies, including Apple Inc. and Microsoft.^[23] Facebook was then opened on September 26, 2006 to everyone of ages 13 and older with a valid e-mail address.^[24][25] In October 2008, Facebook announced that it was to set up its international headquarters in Dublin, Ireland.^[26]

Financials

Entrance to Facebook's current headquarters in the Stanford Research Park, Palo Alto, California

Another view of Facebook's current headquarters

Facebook received its first investment of US$500,000 in June 2004 from PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel.^[27] This was followed a year later by $12.7 million in venture capital from Accel Partners, and then $27.5 million more from Greylock Partners.^[27][28] A leaked cash flow statement showed that during the 2005 fiscal year, Facebook had a net loss of $3.63 million.^[29]

With the sale of social networking website MySpace to News Corp on July 19, 2005, rumors surfaced about the possible sale of Facebook to a larger media company.^[30] Zuckerberg had already said he did not want to sell the company, and denied rumors to the contrary.^[31] On March 28, 2006, BusinessWeek reported that a potential acquisition of Facebook was under negotiation. Facebook reportedly declined an offer of $750 million from an unknown bidder, and it was rumored the asking price rose as high as $2 billion.^[32]

In September 2006, serious talks between Facebook and Yahoo! took place concerning acquisition of Facebook, with prices reaching as high as $1 billion.^[33] Thiel, by then a board member of Facebook, indicated that Facebook's internal valuation was around $8 billion based on their projected revenues of $1 billion by 2015, comparable to Viacom's MTV brand, a company with a shared target demographic audience.^[34]

On July 17, 2007, Zuckerberg said that selling Facebook was unlikely because he wanted to keep it independent, saying "We're not really looking to sell the company... We're not looking to IPO anytime soon. It's just not the core focus of the company."^[35]

In September 2007, Microsoft approached Facebook, proposing an investment in return for a 5% stake in the company, offering an estimated $300–500 million.^[36] That month, other companies, including Google, expressed interest in buying a portion of Facebook.^[37]

On October 24, 2007 Microsoft announced that it had purchased a 1.6% share of Facebook for $240 million, giving Facebook a total implied value of around $15 billion.^[38] However, Microsoft bought preferred stock that carried special rights, such as "liquidation preferences" that meant Microsoft would get paid before common stockholders if the company is sold. Microsoft's purchase also included rights to place international ads on Facebook.^[39]

In November 2007, Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing invested $60 million in Facebook.^[40]

In August 2008, BusinessWeek reported that private sales by employees, as well as purchases by venture capital firms, had and were being done at share prices that put the company's total valuation at between $3.75 billion and $5 billion.^[39]

In October 2008, Zuckerberg said "I don't think social networks can be monetized in the same way that search did... In three years from now we have to figure out what the optimum model is. But that is not our primary focus today."^[41]

Website

Facebook's new homepage features a login form on the top right for existing users and a registration form directly underneath for new visitors.

Facebook users may choose to join one or more networks, organized by city, workplace, school, and region.^[42] These networks help users connect with members of the same network. Users can also connect with friends, giving them access to their friends' profiles.^[43]

The website is free to users and generates revenue from advertising including banner ads.^[44] Users can create profiles including photos and lists of personal interests, exchange private or public messages, and join groups of friends.^[45] By default, the viewing of detailed profile data is restricted to users from the same network and "reasonable community limitations".^[46]

Microsoft is Facebook's exclusive partner for serving banner advertising,^[47] and as such Facebook only serves advertisements that exist in Microsoft's advertisement inventory. According to comScore, an internet marketing research company, Facebook collects as much data from its visitors as Google and Microsoft, but considerably less than Yahoo!.^[48]

Step1: Log into facebook and don't worry about making another account. They will not be able to trace you down and ban you.

Step2:

• Find the person's unique profile ID.
• Search for them and click view friends or send message.
• Write the unique ID from the address bar (only the numbers) or copy it somewhere else.

Step3: Now that you have your unique profile ID you can use the next two links to view a total of 40 tagged photos:

If you wish to see tagged photos added by others use this link:

http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=12345678&op=1&view=all&subj=[Unique ID]&id=[Unique ID]

If you wish to see tagged photos added by themselves use this link:

http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=13245678&op=1&view=user&subj=[Unique ID]&id=[Unique ID]

Each link contains two places for [Unique ID] you simply replace this with the person’s unique ID that you have copied at the first step.

REMOVE THE BRACKETS IN [UNIQUE ID] .. replace that whole thing with the profile ID you copied.

Step4: You can now see up to 40 photos of someone on a private profile. Enjoy.

The rise in popularity of the soon-to-be number 1 social network site Facebook is due to a combination of two things.

1. Formerly a hangout only for high school and college students, Facebook allowed anyone to join in September, 2006.

2. In May, 2007 Facebook opened up it’s network to developers.

By opening up it’s network to developers Facebook has provided a way to make money right on the Facebook web site. Something you can’t do on MySpace. The only way to make money off of MySpace is by attracting users to another web site outside the MySpace community and making money on that site.

Below is an Alexa traffic comparison of the top two social network sites. Bold prediction: It won’t be long before Facebook becomes more popular than MySpace.

Facebook: a developer magnet

Since opening up it’s network to developers Facebook has seen a flood of new applications created. In fact, over 1000 developers are signing up every day.

Addonomics, an open analytics platform that tracks Facebook application growth and provides stock-market-style analysis of Facebook features says that as of today…

• There are 342,015,965 installs across 5,118 apps on Facebook.
• These applications were used 23,360,190 times in the last 24 hours and have a combined valuation of $249,800,000.
• Facebook has approximately 40 million Unique Active Users in the past 30 days and a valuation between $10Bn and $15Bn.
• This translates to between $250 and $375 per active user.

7 ways to make money with Facebook

In The Facebook Economy Business 2.0 outlined a few ways application developers are making money off of Facebook.

1. Selling advertising space
Facebook apps with large audiences can make a lot of money selling ad space on their page through ad networks like Lookery, Userplane and Google Adsense.

2. Sponsorship
Advertisers are lining up to sponsor popular Facebook applications. The Food Fight! application which lets you throw virtual food at your friends is soon to be serving up virtual chicken wings from a major food chain. Tyson???

3. Sell goods and services
The future of Facebook applications is utility, not fun. Facebook application Band Tracker searches upcoming concerts and links to ticket vendor web sites. Soon, it will be common for people to make purchases from their own Facebook pages.

Lee Lorenzen, CEO of Altura Ventures provided us with the following four ways to make money with Facebook.

4. Write a Facebook book
I’ve heard about a number in the works and that means advances/royalties for authors.

5. Write a Facebook blog
There are already a number of good ones beginning to cover the Facebook eco-system but there is room for more. Once you have an audience for your blog you can start selling ads and sponsorships.

6. Develop Facebook apps as a consultant
Good / great Facebook developers are in very limited supply and so the demand is high. I’ve heard of hourly rates in the $200 per hour range for folks who can architect, write and deploy viral Facebook apps.

7. Sell your Facebook app
If you can create an app on Facebook, get it to 10K to 100K users, harvest some ad revenue from it by partnering with AdBrite for CPM/CPC ads, offer Cost Per Install ads via Adonomics and you provide data to get an Adonomics certified valuation, then you will be in a position to get top dollar for your application should you decide to sell it.

At the moment, the big winners of the Facebook jackpot are application developers. The big losers might be other social networks like MySpace, if they fail to open up their networks.

With the release of its new platform, Facebook’s recent endeavor in social media presents a unique opportunity for marketers, developers and businesses to tap into the social network’s young, active, and viral crowd.

However, over the past few weeks there has been a rising concern among developers to uncover ways to monetize their Facebook applications. The curse of instant online success is that you can no longer sustain expensive servers to support hundreds and thousands (or even millions) of Facebook users. The question: how can the developers of Facebook apps actually make money? We don’t have all the answers yet, but here are 5 suggestions:

1. SELL. Develop applications solely for the purpose of selling them to interested parties. Several applications have already been acquired in this fashion; the most recent example is that of Mozes’ purchase of TextMe.

2. DEVELOP. An indirect source of funds: develop applications under contract for third parties. A number of companies have been posting contract jobs over at the Facebook’s developer forums. There exists a large gap in the supply and demand of available Facebook application developers; as a result, finding potential clients to charge reasonable rates should not be a hassle.

3. ADVERTISING. Use advertisements, cross-promotion schemes and affiliate marketing. It is not feasible to use Google Adsense for this since Facebook does not allow JavaScript embedding. Adsense may be embedded through iFrames, which despite being popular among Facebook developers, is against Google’s TOS. Affiliate marketing is a great alternative to advertisements; my own source of income on Facebook is generated through Amazon’s affiliate marketing.

4. MICROPAYMENTS. Sell services within Facebook through micro-payment transactions. PayPal payments made for accessing premium services could potentially yield reasonable income depending on the application’s purpose, size, and prospective users.

5. GET INVESTMENT. If you think you have something big on your hands and lack the funds to scale it, apply for investment through Bay Partners and others who have expressed interest in funding Facebook apps. This would be the likely course of action for a startup with plans to expand globally within and beyond Facebook.

——————Facebook has a huge active community. It is reported that of the 29 million active users, about half log in each day. This is a rarity among Web 2.0 companies (comparatively, Google Videos has about 3% active users). If Facebook () can convince its users to shell out $1 to send those silly virtual “gift” images to each other, then surely a clever developer or startup can find other approaches to earning money from a Facebook application that do not involve just drowning their users in ads.

Due to the pace of innovation over the web, it is imperative that companies jump on opportunities like these as they turn up. LinkedIn () and Bebo are expected to release their own set of developer APIs as well; I personally cannot wait to be among the first to tap into that opportunity. I advise others to start planning as well.

This post is written by Jawad Shuaib, developer of Shuzak, a social network for geeks. He also built the “Favorite Books” Facebook application.

Facebook Application Developers in High Demand

Do a search on any of the major job search sites for ‘facebook developer’ and you’ll see just how large the demand for developers is. Many large companies are paying top dollar to developers who have the know how to build Facebook applications.

Stanford offers Facebook class

Stanford’s computer science department is offering a course on creating Facebook applications. Class started on Sept. 27 and has over 100 students enrolled. I imagine that many more computer science and digital media programs will begin offering similar courses in the near future. They’d be crazy not to.

You can follow the Stanford course online at this Facebook Group.

Facebook application development resources

I have created a list of resources for those who can’t take the Stanford course but still want to learn how to create Facebook applications.

Facebook developers area - Documentation, resources, tools and news for Facebook developers provided by Facebook. They say it is ‘Everything you need to get started building Facebook applications.’

Facebook application basics - A brief overview of the fundamentals to building a Facebook application.

Facebook application tutorial - Excellent information and a great tutorial on how to create a Facebook application using Ruby on Rails.

Now go create the next great Facebook application.

Facebook applications are both big business and old news. Most of them are also lame: At best, they're stupid time-wasters, but many of them don't work at all, or work best as spam.

But there are some apps out there that have real utility -- or at least more than ones that let you figure out which Evanescence song best describes you, or what your name would be if you have certain jobs. One problem common to many of these overlooked apps -- they'd be a lot more useful if they had more users. But they're worth checking out, anyway.

• imo.im messenger (4,884 daily active users) – The popular web-based messaging system is also a Facebook app that brings together AIM, MSN, Y!, Gtalk and your Facebook username. Facebook execs love to describe the company as a communication service, and this makes it a much better one.

• Call Me On Skype (860 daily active users) – Users can use their Skype account to call people through Facebook. Skype’s fees still apply, so this is one of the few apps that isn’t free. But then again it's actually worth paying for.
  

• Carpool (760 daily active users) – Allows users to find different people to carpool with on a regular or one-time basis. If you find someone, you're under no obligation to accept the ride. The catch: With such a small user base you're going to have a hard time finding someone.
  

• Yahoo! Music Videos (665 daily active users) – There are tons of video apps, but this one works really well. And because Yahoo's actually paying the music labels to use the videos, you don't have to worry about your favorite video getting taken down. You can embed videos into your profile, or watch them on the player.
  

• My Restaurants (97 daily active users) – This app, created by two students from Tulane and Northeastern, fills the void the Zagat folks haven't taken advantage of. The interface works really well and the database is searchable by genre, location, or feature (BYOB, reservations accepted, etc.).
  

• Takes All Types (undisclosed user basey) – A blood donation database that will contact you whenever your blood type is in need, using whatever contact method you choose.
  

• Find a better job (14 daily active users)/Job search agent (43 daily active users) – From CareerBuilder and MonsterTrak, respectively. They basically legitimize your Facebook addiction while you’re unemployed.
  

• Top Groups (609 daily active users)/Sort Friends By (136 daily active users) – Two out of the thousands of applications that help organize your profile. Because once you’ve added the other eight apps, it’s going to look pretty bad.
  

Are there any Facebook apps you like? Let us in comments.