Home - Stay N Alive

Just in Time for F8, O’Reilly’s First Book on Facebook Development Released

Posted on July 21, 2008 by jessestay

I’m proud to announce that this week, just in time for Facebook F8 and OSCON, my book, FBML Essentials, will be available for purchase in print at most book stores. You can purchase it on Amazon here (be sure to leave a review!). It is scheduled to ship this Thursday, July 24th. You can also check it out online right now via O’Reilly’s Safari book store.

Some of the biggest Facebook bloggers and experts in the industry have also contributed their thoughts. Nick O’Neill, of AllFacebook.com and SocialTimes.com, contributed the Foreword for the book. Rodney Rumford, of FaceReviews.com and Gravitational Media, contributed the Afterword for the book. Justin Smith, of InsideFacebook.com and WaterCooler, was generous enough to provide a quote for the back cover (we’re hoping it made it in – I’m told it has). I’d like to thank them for their contribution.

FBML Essentials is essentially a very simple “nutshell” book that should give you all you need to get started with Facebook development in the FBML tag language, minus the API itself. It covers a howto on creating Apps from start to finish, using simple HTML and FBML to get a simple App off the ground. I go over different quirks with HTML and Javascript in regards to how Facebook parses them. I also cover the way Facebook talks to your servers, and provide a few suggestions on where to host and how to get set up properly and make your App viral. The final one half or so of the book is a thorough reference of almost (Facebook just added 2 more tags last week) every single tag Facebook provides, including examples, sample HTML that Facebook renders, and more. I even cover some unknowns (while maybe not so useful, but fun regardless) such as the tag, and tag. (yes, there are such tags, and as of the writing they work!)

If you are a web developer considering learning Facebook development, this book is a great start, and should point you in the right direction on where to go afterwards. If you’re already a Facebook developer, this book will be a great addition to your book collection, and you should be able to refer back to it often as a reference as you see need.

I imagine with today’s launch of the new Facebook design many may be wondering if the book is already out of date. Actually, I was able to get some of the last minute changes in response to the new design out in just the last 2 weeks, so this book is very up to date – O’Reilly has been wonderful to work with for this project.

Looking to learn how to write software on Facebook? FBML Essentials is a great start – pre-order yours now! Look for me at Facebook’s F8 conference this Wednesday – I’ll be shooting video, qik’ing if possible, and live-blogging where I can. Say hi if you see me around!

Amazon S3 Outage Affecting Book Sales

Posted on July 21, 2008 by jessestay

I was just writing a post about my new book on Facebook development, FBML Essentials, being released, when I realized Amazon’s problems right now are much bigger than S3. Previously, if I did a search for “Facebook“, an entire list of books would display, including my first book. Currently, it returns nothing. Searching for “I’m on Facebook–Now What???” also returns nothing. At this point, I’m not quite sure what gets returned via search on Amazon.

Amazon is currently losing I’m sure thousands of dollars in sales as their site is having some unknown, perhaps S3-related issue. The problem is, not only are they losing money, but so are the authors and distributors selling through their site. It’s my hope that they get this resolved soon and can get things back in order. Is anyone seeing other things that are down related to this outage?

Update: it appears to be back up again, so the outage seems to be sporadic, perhaps a caching issue?

MonsterCable.com Oblivious to SEO

Posted on July 15, 2008 by jessestay

I’ve been searching for a good mobile solution for my iPhone for close to a year now to no avail, and now that I’ve got the new phone I thought I’d do another search. For my old iPod, I own a Monster Cable iCruze, which integrates with your car stereo to attach directly to your iPod and you can then control the playlists on your iPod via your car stereo’s controls. Currently, it is serving as a great car charger for my iPhone, and that’s about it.

So I decided to do a search for an iPhone compatible version of the iCruze today, and was surprised to find that the king of all cables, Monster Cables itself’s, own website is completely inaccessible from Google, or any Firefox 3 user because of supposed “malware”. Currently, if you do a search for “Monster Cable” via Google, you’re presented with a link like below, warning you that the site “may harm your computer”.

Picture 1.png

Click on that link, and you’ll go to a page like this, completely preventing access to Monster Cable’s website without explicitly copying and pasting Monster cable’s URL in your browser:

Picture 2.png

Explicitly entering the URL, if you are in Firefox 3, takes you to the following page, which gives you the option to continue, but throughout the site this page appears again and again, making it extremely difficult to navigate. Firefox 3 seems to rely on Google’s own malware reporting, which is the reason for Firefox’s error.

Picture 3.png

The Google “Safe Browsing Diagnostic Page” for MonsterCable.com seems to indicate that the error is most likely being generated by third party scripts that are “hosted on 9 domain(s), including hdrcom.com, gbradw.com, bkpadd.mobi”. Google seems to indicate that this has been happening over the past 90 days.

It goes without wonder why such a large profile cable company as Monster Cable could not notice such a decrease in traffic from pretty much all of Google, and why if they have noticed, they have not taken action. We clearly know that no one at Monster Cable seems to be a Firefox 3 user, and if they do, they definitely don’t visit their own site, because you think that it would be fixed by now.

Can anyone figure out what the scripts are that Google claims to be malicious?

The iPhone AT&T vs. T-Mobile Comparison

Posted on July 15, 2008 by jessestay

I am an original iPhone user, but I only did so on condition that I could remain on T-Mobile. I unlocked and Jailbroke my first generation iPhone, and loved every bit about it! Now that the new iPhone is out and my T-Mobile contract is approaching its end, I decided to buy the new 3G iPhone and give AT&T a try. At the same time, for the last few days I left my T-Mobile phone running. Here are the results of my findings:

Network

The first thing I noticed when I turned on my 3G iPhone on the AT&T network is that I have only about 1/4 the bars I do on T-Mobile on average. It seemed to vary depending on my location, but overall AT&T, at least in my area, seemed to have a poorer signal.

Here is a picture of my original iPhone on T-Mobile – notice all 5 bars:

Here is a picture of my new 3G iPhone on AT&T – notice only 2 bars!:

However, during some tests I did later, I noticed that when I turn off 3G on my new iPhone, the AT&T iPhone goes back up to 5 bars. It seems that the 3G has some affect on the phone signal – something to remember if you need a stronger cell phone signal. Here’s my new AT&T iPhone with 3G turned off:

Speed

The obvious difference currently between AT&T and T-Mobile is that T-Mobile has not yet converted to the coveted 3G network in the United States. They will be rolling out nationwide in September we’re told, but at the moment, Edge is your only option. So speed is certainly a difference between the two phones. I decided to try an experiment to see if Edge on T-Mobile was as fast as Edge on AT&T. You can see my findings in this video:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjfKhTlCu6c&hl=en&fs=1]

As you can see, 3G truly is almost exactly twice as fast, just as Apple says. So speed truly is a matter of “What you see is what you get.”

Price

Now for pricing. I decided to take my existing family rate plan on T-Mobile, add unlimited data to both mine and my wife’s accounts, along with unlimited text messaging, at 700 minutes per month. Granted T-Mobile does not have rollover minutes, but let’s just try to compare apples to apples.

Taking the exact same 700 minute family time plan on AT&T and comparing it to T-Mobiles and what we are paying currently, based on my last bill, AT&T will end up costing me almost exactly $40 more per month than T-Mobile does currently. The added advantages I get from AT&T from a service perspective are rollover minutes and 3G, so I guess it’s up to the individual to determine if it’s worth it for higher speed and re-usable minutes. For me that 3G is crucial so at the moment that will be the choice for me.

Now, the other little known fact about pricing is that, should you go with a T-Mobile contract, T-Mobile charges you $200 per line to terminate your contract early, and it is not pro-rated. So I get charged the same $200 per line now with only 2 months left as I would have at the beginning of my plan, costing me a total of $400 if I were to terminate now with T-Mobile. So I’ll be left to reducing my T-Mobile plan to the very cheapest plan available and letting it run out. Not a wise plan on T-Mobile’s part if you ask me, since I have to make the choice between them and AT&T.

AT&T’s early termination fee is $175 per line. However, their plan is pro-rated to $5/month. Therefore, if I terminate early now I pay $175 per line, but if I decide 2 months from the end of my plan, I pay next to nothing. Because of that, IMO, AT&T is much less of a rip-off. These early-termination fees alone could make AT&T the actual cheaper choice.

Hassle

Hassle is obviously an important factor between AT&T and T-Mobile for the iPhone. Obviously, unlocking the iPhone 3G for the average Joe is not quite possible yet, and therefore it is absolutely not possible to use it on T-Mobile. However, when it is available, it’s simply a matter of running a simple Mac or Windows program and voila, your iPhone can now run on T-Mobile along with the ability to customize your iPhone beyond what its current capabilities provide. I argue though that having to re-do this every time Apple releases a new software update does add quite a bit of Hassle, and you have to weigh that.

With my AT&T phone, while I do have the hassle of dealing with a closed system and relying completely on Apple for the updates I need, I do not need to worry about re-updating for each software update provided. True, I could also jailbreak my AT&T phone, and in that case the hassle would be the same between the two.

Features

As far as features go, the only difference between T-Mobile and AT&T on the iPhone is that AT&T provides Visual Voicemail, and T-Mobile doesn’t. I really like the Visual Voicemail feature thus far, but I really don’t use it much. I generally forward my calls through Google’s Grandcentral so not many people actually call my direct cell phone number. This makes that feature mostly useless for me.

So in the end, the major difference I’ve discovered between having an iPhone on AT&T vs. T-Mobile is the price. AT&T is quite a bit more expensive on a month-to-month scale, however, if you ever need to cancel your plan, T-Mobile will leave you hanging. Other than that, the two are exactly the same.

Have you run your original iPhone on T-Mobile? Are there any other differences you have noticed?

Utah Social Media Developers Garage – Great Turnout!

Posted on July 14, 2008 by jessestay

I’ve been meaning to blog this for a few days now and I want to apologize to our generous sponsors that gave us a place to host the meeting and great food, all at no cost to us for taking so long. We had one of our highest attendance meetings ever for the Utah Social Media Developers Garage last Tuesday, where we watched a great video from the Palo Alto Facebook Developers Garage in May, and then went over the new Facebook Design. There were many great questions, and I think people are more enthusiastic than ever on building Facebook apps. We had near 25 attend, and I only expect that number to grow based on the excitement we saw.

I am always impressed at these meetings, as I seem to meet new Facebook developers working on new Apps each time we have these things. Facebook is truly on the radar for many businesses in Utah – I’m very excited to see what comes out of it!

A special thanks goes to EPIC Ventures and Rachel Strate, who hosted the event – if you are writing a Facebook App and need some investment, give Rachel a ring! Also thanks to Bungee Labs, who at the last minute stepped in to provide Pizza for everyone. I’ve reviewed them before but I do recommend you try them out and see how they can fit into your software development plans if you get a chance. If your business would like to host or provide food for future events, please let me know – it’s a great way to get in front of a group of developers!

These meetings are a true community effort – if you would like to help out or be an officer please let me know and we’ll get you involved in helping me plan the events. Heck, if you think you can do it better I’m open to even letting you take over! These are not my events, but yours, so I want to be sure those attending are able to contribute – if you’re interested in helping please let me know. Also, please let me know if you have an idea for a meeting.

Our next meeting will be September 9 from 7pm to 10pm so add it to your calendars now! My O’Reilly Book, FBML Essentials, will be available then and perhaps we can do a Facebook development focus around that – maybe a launch party of some sort? You can learn more about our group on the group’s official Facebook Group here, or by joining the Google Group here.

The iPhone is an Investment – How I Sold My 2G for $510

Posted on July 14, 2008 by jessestay

My original 2G iPhone actually made me money. I mean literally – it made me $111 to be exact! I have long been a fan of Apple products. Not only is the UI superb, but Apple focuses on the entire experience – from the hype before the product launch, the purchase of the product, to the unboxing of the product, to owning the product and making every element of the product an enjoyable experience. Not surprisingly, every Apple product I’ve owned has also held its value at the time of sale. My very first iBook died, wouldn’t even boot, and with full disclosure I sold it, DOA, for $500 on Ebay. My second laptop, a Macbook, I made $200 on it after owning it for a few months (I sold it because my job at the time gave me 2 laptops and I did not need 3). I was completely amazed, that when I decided to try the same on my old iPhone, the same thing rang true. I bought my original iPhone at $399 just less than a year ago, and almost a year later, I was able to sell it yesterday (unlocked) for $510 on Ebay. Name one other cell phone that you can do that with on the market today.

If there’s one reason you buy an iPhone it should be that it, among all the other cell phones on the market, will not depreciate near as much as that of other phones. In fact, with the continued innovation of Apple and their continued edge they seem to have on the market, the hype surrounding the iPhone could just so happen to increase the value of your old phone to higher than you bought it.

I don’t know how long to expect these inflated prices to last, but so long as Apple stays innovative, and they continue to force customers into contracts on the new 3G phones, unlocked 2G iPhones actually have a value that the new 3G iPhones do not have – the ability to buy a phone, right up front, with no contract or provider tied to it. I don’t expect the price of the 2G’s to go down any time soon. Growing up my Dad (he is an Accountant) always taught me to make purchases that were the least likely to depreciate. The iPhone is a wise financial choice to make.

Have you made money on your iPhone? Please share your stories!

Developers Unhappy With Facebook Profile Redesign

Posted on July 10, 2008 by jessestay

Just this past week, Facebook announced that starting next week users will begin to have the option to adopt the new profile design into their Facebook account. Facebook has been preparing this for months, and supposedly was set to try and launch a few months ago. However, even today the new Profile redesign does not seem ready, and it appears developers aren’t happy.

For the past month or two Facebook has enabled access to the new design to those that have the developers app installed in their account via the url http://www.new.facebook.com. This was to enable developers to begin to prepare their applications for when the redesign goes live. The new design change will make significant changes to the way news stories are published to the user’s mini feed in Facebook, allow the developers to move profile boxes to various areas within a user’s profile, and will introduce a new “info” profile integration point for developers as well as an entire tab on the user’s profile that can be devoted to a developer’s application.

For those developers that don’t prepare, application profile boxes will, by default, be placed in a separate tab entitled, “boxes”, away from the main area of the user’s profile. In addition, news stories will no longer be published to a user’s profile in the same way they are now. This introduces concerns for developers that are worried Facebook has not given them enough time to prepare for this change.

Developers have a valid concern too if they don’t think they were given enough time. For instance, it wasn’t until just last week that the example “MySmily” application on Facebook began to work (it had been working before, but it seems for several days it was down, and has been up and down frequently since it was shown to developers). This app is the sample that Facebook provided for developers to learn of the new integration points from. Its functionality has been quite flaky over time, making it difficult for developers to have full access to it to learn how to develop for the new design. In fact, even today installing the latest version of the “MySmily” source code per the documentation returns with an error.

We went over a demo of this application and the new design in our Social Media Developers Garage here in Salt Lake City last night, and we quickly discovered the new design was riddled with cross-browser compatibility issues. I couldn’t do things in Safari that others could do in Firefox, and others running Internet Explorer also were having major issues gaining full access to the new design. Also, ironically, while Facebook recently launched the ability to comment on mini-feed and status items in the old design, the new design is void of this new feature. Add to that on a large screen like my 27″ the site is mostly white space on both sides and really doesn’t look very good, Facebook still has some serious design issues to work out.

In addition, there still remain many mysteries for developers. Facebook has still not made any mention as to where ads can and can’t be placed in the new design. The documentation remains vague – there are many references to passing a variable into a setFBML call to determine where the application’s profile goes, but there are no examples as to how to set that. Also, the Facebook test consoles are also seemingly having issues supporting the new API and FBML tags and calls. Several FBML tags are also not working, including , a popular tag used by many developers (including myself) for displaying a comments box in their application.

The things I mention are only the tip of the iceberg. Many developers are angry that the new design will mean less traffic and user engagement for their applications. Many businesses could be dead overnight from this new design. There are several topics open in the developer forums with developers stating their frustrations with the new design. “distinctdev” says, “Still no solid spec and the new profile launches in 1 week – Whats up with that?”. There is an entire petition set up by developers asking to say “no” to the new Facebook profile. That petition is here, and thus far there are 17 signatures. From that forum post, “Wild Bill”, author of the “Robot Armies” app on Facebook states:

“I wholeheartedly agree with those of you who said the current design should be cleaned up rather than completely changed. I’ve long seen Facebook as one of the finest examples of excellent web design; it’s all very well executed. The new design is definitely a step back; it feels spread out, bloated, and clunky because of the massive amount of JavaScript piled onto it. The old design could be enhanced to correct the problems the platform currently has. I anticipate a very large reduction of activity on my apps, not only because of detrimental changes to the platform, but because of people who are bothered enough by the new design that they no longer use Facebook.

From “friendhugs“, “Nobody will be using the new format for quite awhile. It’s all opt in right now, and I suspect once they find out nothing works, they’ll just flip right back.”. Also see “madpuffin’s” issue here. I could go on and on with more developers having issues and frustrations like this.

Of course, with any new change, there is going to be whiners and complainers and fallout due to the changes – this is a fact of life with any new design. I have seen it plenty of times with redesigns I have done in the past. However, the problems Facebook seems to still have in the new design go way beyond just design issues, and frankly, I think these developers (including myself) have some valid concerns! It will be interesting to see if Facebook can work out all these issues before they launch next week, or if they’re still going to launch, bugs and all.

House Committee Seeks to Tighten the Content You Can See in Government

Posted on July 8, 2008 by jessestay

Representative John Culberson, the Twittering and Qik’ing Congressman from my good old home town of Houston, Texas, has been on a rampage this morning about a proposed new regulation for the House of Representatives, which, he claims, will require all world wide web communications from the House floor from those in congress to receive “prior approval” from a Democratically-controlled Committee on House Administration before it goes out to the web. From the letter:

“

Official content posted on an external domain must be clearly identified as produced by a House office for official purposes, and meet existing content rules and regulations;

To the maximum extent possible, the official content should not be posted on a website or page where it may appear with commercial or political information or any other information not in compliance with the House’s content guidelines.

Any link from a House website to an external site on which the Member video is hosted must contain an exit notice.

CHA, the Office of Web Assistance(OWA), or other designated House entity should maintain a list of external sites that meet whatever requirements are established by the CHA

“

Per the above proposed recommendations, this would rule out any Twitter communication because by law, each Tweet would need to be prepended by a disclaimer, identifying it as being produced by a House office for official purposes and, as Culberson puts it, that will most likely in and of its self exceed 140 characters. Also, it would mean that any Congressman wishing to use a site such as Twitter to share publicly what is going on in Congress with their constituents will have to get prior approval, censorship essentially, before using such a site or technology.

I find it ironic that it is a Republican that is trying to show the Democrats how to use technology on this, but Representative Culberson has a point here, and we need to speak up if we’re to continue seeing social media propagate through our government. Social Media in government means a more open government, and that’s a good thing! I’d like to encourage all that read this to write your Congressman or Congresswoman about this (Pelosi is part of this!) and get them to see things straight rather than requiring censorship of our House floor.

You can read the Proposal here. (Which, were this proposal to take effect, I believe I would be breaking the law by sharing with you)

UPDATE: Want to discuss? Let’s discuss in a nice open format right below this post via the FriendFeed link below!

Twitter Bringing Rate Limits Back to Normal

Posted on July 8, 2008 by jessestay

On the heels of a post this morning by Biz Stone, it appears Twitter is beginning to bring the rate limit for posts through the Twitter API back to the 70 per hour it used to be. For the last several months, Twitter has brought that limit down to only 20 requests per hour. Per the Twitter developers mailing list just now, Twitter has now raised that limit to 40, and will gradually be raising it back up to 70 in the upcoming week.

This is welcome news in the week of months of API and service outages. What this means is that you, as the user will no longer see the “Rate Limit Exceeded” error you may be seeing through clients like Twhirl. In regards to the API this leaves mainly just the XMPP stream that they need to re-enable for developers – this may not be happening any time soon however, as Twitter may be looking to only enable a select few developers access to the stream.

Has this request limit affected you as a developer? How about as a user?