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I’ve Been Guy Kawasaki’d!

Posted on April 3, 2008 by jessestay

Greetings to all of my new subscribers, thanks to a great post I’ve been working on with Guy Kawasaki over on his blog here:

http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2008/04/ten-things-you.html

The post is about 10 things you didn’t know about Facebook – these are all excerpts that you can find bits and pieces about in “I’m On Facebook–Now What???“, with a few additions. I’m really glad Guy put me to task to put this list together. Be sure to purchase one of his books as well!

The story behind this post is both Guy Kawasaki and Chris Pirillo were looking for a way to automatically follow those that follow them on Twitter, so they could better communicate with their fan-base. I decided to take this as an opportunity (as I wanted the same feature for myself), and wrote http://socialtoo.com to do just that for them. They both signed up (see Chris Pirillo’s post here – he mistakingly thought I worked for Twitter), and Guy Kawasaki generously offered to promote the book Jason Alba and I wrote, “I’m On Facebook–Now What???” via his blog. The funny thing is I was actually able to use Guy’s, “I know you would do the same for me…” as Guy thanked me for helping him out.

After my experience with Guy I respect him even more. Without my asking he offered to help me out – this is now my new mantra. When you do good things for others, looking for their needs, in my opinion, regardless of pay it always comes back to you. I will be devoting my time on Sundays to help out charitable causes such as Takes All Types (recently featured here and here), not necessarily because I’m expecting anything out of it, but because I know it helps other people, and just knowingly that always comes around for good on your behalf in the end. Thank you Guy for your sincere promotion of my book in your article!

If you’re looking for Facebook consulting, or have an external application outside, or inside a social network you would like to consider including as part of SocialOptimize’s community of Social Applications, please contact me at the links on the right – I promise I will get back to you!

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SocialOptimize Announces the "We’re Protestant" Facebook App

Posted on April 3, 2008 by jessestay

Yesterday’s announcement of the Catholic vs. Protestant App on Facebook, if you didn’t try to install it, was intended to be just an April Fools joke. I’m proud to announce a new App however which isn’t a joke. I’d like to announce that we’re now launching a new compliment to SocialOptimize‘s “Holy Rolls” line of religious community applications. I’m titling the app, “We’re Protestant“, in harmony with the current Apps, “We’re Baptist“, and “We’re Catholic“. “We’re Catholic” is currently the largest group of organized Catholics on Facebook at near 45,000 users. It is my hope that “We’re Protestant” will even further exceed that with a much larger American following.

Are you Protestant? This App is intended to be your App, and should entitle you to identify yourself as a Protestant to all your friends on Facebook. We’ll continue to work to give you more ways to live your religion on Facebook and other social networks and share that with your friends. Currently, you can pick your favorite verses from the King James version of the bible, display those verses randomly on your profile, as well as list other friends who have added the application and are Protestant. Some future considerations will allow you to track churches you’ve attended and friends from those churches, as well as sending Prayers to others.

We will also be working on some complimentary applications that fit well with almost anyone who is religious. While the “Catholic vs. Protestant” App was intended to just be an April Fools joke, I think there is strong potential to enable peaceful discussion between religions, and on the other hand, allow you to test your knowledge within your own religion and compare it with others in yours and other religions to see which religions know most about their own faith. You should see that, and a few other similar apps in coming months.

The greatest feature of this launch is what we did behind the scenes. Now, the Holy Rolls suite of community applications on Facebook and other social networks is a complete, consolidated, code base. With just a simple change to the database we can now quickly, and easily launch more community apps. Expect to see We’re Jewish, We’re Islam, and maybe even We’re FSM (Flying Spaghetti Monster) soon. Even bigger news is that we can now expand this to more than just religion – imagine a “We’re Snowboarders” app, a “We’re Quilters” app, and others. If you currently run a website outside Facebook and would like to bring your community inside of Facebook, or have an existing Facebook App you’d like to integrate into our platform please talk to me. We are truly at the cusp of a huge group of niche communities we can bring together and include common functionality – contact me if you’d like to join or compliment what we’re doing!

Are you Protestant? Add “We’re Protestant!” here:

http://apps.facebook.com/wereprotestant/

Facebook Gives Developers a Way to Combat Spam 2.0 With

Posted on April 3, 2008 by jessestay

Facebook seems to have been on a role lately in adding new FBML tags. They are certainly keeping me busy while I finish up the final phases of “FBML Essentials“. Ironically in short duration after I posted my Spam 2.0 article, Facebook seems, based on a new post to the developers wiki, to be providing a new way to combat your Application from being maliciously used by adding the ability to add “Captchas”, or graphics with manipulated text in them to re-enter in a text box provided in the captcha. These Captchas traditionally are ways to ensure only real humans are using your software.

What is interesting is normally you would think having a Facebook profile would be enough to prove it is a real human using the Application. Within the application a developer in normal FBML can always check to see that it is a logged-in Facebook user using the application, or someone accessing the application in an unauthenticated state. Facebook is going one step further with this however – there’s nothing stopping a Facebook account from being hijacked as we mentioned earlier, and using that account to run a malicious Facebook app for a day or two before Facebook catches it and either steal your data or Spam other users. That’s what I’m assuming the launch of this tag is for.

The tag works like this – it is to be contained in any tagset, and can contain one optional attribute, “showall” which allows you to always display the captcha on the App regardless if they passed the captcha before or not, or only display it to those that have not yet been verified. The code would look like this (from the developers wiki):

Upon submit, the user would be taken back to the callback url for your application, and the additional parameter, “fb_sig_captcha_grade=1” will be passed to your application assuming the user passed the Captcha. If they did not pass, it will be set to 0. The end result captcha when render seems to look like any other captcha box on Facebook, which it seems they are using the Recaptcha format which gives back to Archive.org’s book transcription and archiving project. So regardless of whether you really need a captcha or not, you can be comfortable your app is giving back to a good cause. The captcha looks like this (also from the Facebook developer’s wiki):

SocialOptimize’s "Holy Rolls" Announces the "Catholic vs. Protestant" App

Posted on April 1, 2008 by jessestay

Are you getting tired of the whole, “Pirates vs. Ninjas” or “Zombies vs. Werewolfs” debate? How about joining a real man’s debate! I’m proud to announce the launch of an unprecedented Application that actually has a real purpose in discussion! It goes back to the age-old debate of which religion is right, whose religion is better? Perhaps one of the longest debates in history, I announce, in conjunction with SocialOptimize’s Holy Rolls Suite of Religious Social Applications, the “Catholic vs. Protestant” application on Facebook. I’ve been following the discussions on “We’re Catholic“, and I’ve finally decided it’s time to give users an application they can put their religion where their mouth is. So, if you’re Catholic or Protestant (which I assume includes the majority of my audience based on sheer statistics), get on over to Facebook and add the App! Let’s settle this debate once and for all! You can add the application here:

http://apps.facebook.com/catholicvsprotestant

Oh, and if you like this, stay tuned for many more features I’ll be adding to Holy Rolls and SocialOptimize’s Community Apps in the coming weeks!