Presentation by James Leszczenski at Facebook Developer Garage Milan, on 23 April 2009, hosted by Mikamai.

1. Developer Garage Milan
Main Topic: Facebook Connect
April 23, 2009

2. James Leszczenski
Software Engineer at
Facebook
james@facebook.com

3. Agenda
▪ 1. Our Mission
▪ 2. Facebook Connect, An Overview
▪ 3. Getting Started
▪ 4. What’s Next?
▪ 5. Questions

4. Facebook’s Mission:
Give people the power to
share and make the world
more open and connected

5. Your Mission:
Create opportunities for
people to share and make the
world more open and connected

6. What are your goals?
1) Build Traffic
2) Create Deep Engagement
3) Profit Wildly

7. How can Facebook Connect help?
1) Build Traffic through social distribution
2) Create Deep Engagement with identity and social
context
3) Profit Wildly with more traffic and engagement

8. Agenda
▪ 1. Our Mission
▪ 2. Facebook Connect, An Overview
▪ 3. Getting Started
▪ 4. What’s Next?
▪ 5. Questions

9. Overview of Facebook Connect

10. Engaging with a new site is difficult
• Decide to register
• Click “sign up”
• Decide on the basics: Which
email will I use?
The usual password?
User name?
• Add extra info:
Birthday
Name
etc…
• Enter a CAPTCHA
• Confirm
• Get sent to verify email page
• Wait
• Go back in your email, verify
email
• Go back to browser
• And…
Think of the steps users need to go through to sign up & engage with your content.
… the end result is a website with no social data, no customization, and no friends 
10

11. Facebook Connect
Increase registration, engagement and traffic on your site.
• Share their identity and log
in with 1 click
• Bring their friends to your
site, increasing engagement
• Generate more traffic by
distributing your content to
Facebook’s 200 million users
Identity & Login
Friends
Distribution
Facebook Connect allows your visitors to:
11

12. Facebook Connect makes it easy for your users
•Decide to register
•Click “Connect”
•Done
A Connected user brings all of their rich Facebook information and friends
to your site in 1 click.
… a website with your
real-life identity,
customized content and
all your friends.
1. User’s real identity
12
2. Easy access to their
friends and friend
content

13. Users share content back to Facebook
Content from your site gets shared to Facebook. Traffic comes back to your site.
3. Content from your site is easily
distributed on Facebook, sending traffic
back to your site.
13

14. Over 8,000 web sites
have adopted Facebook Connect
Connect is revolutionizing the web
“It is an ingenious stab at solving several
nagging problems at once. Web surfers like
to socialize while they browse the internet,
but many prefer to do so only with their
friends rather than with perfect strangers.”
- Dec 4, 2008
“Because Facebook Connect is not just a
registration system, but also a marketing
channel with a built-in audience of 130
million monthly active users, this program
will crush competing registration systems.”
- Nov 30, 2008
What sites are seeing:
• Registrations 30-100%
• User-generated content 15-60%
• Each story published to FB generates 0.5 to 2
clicks back to the publishing site
“Supporters of this idea say such
programs will help with the emergence
of a new ‘social Web,’ because chatter
among friends will infiltrate even sites
that have been entirely unsociable
thus far.”
- Nov 30, 2008
14

15. Agenda
▪ 1. Our Mission
▪ 2. Facebook Connect, An Overview
▪ 3. Getting Started
▪ 4. What’s Next?
▪ 5. Questions

16. Getting Started

17. Objectives
▪ Main Objective: Integrate Facebook Connect into a web site
▪ 1. Register a new application with Facebook.
▪ 2. Detect the login status of a user.
▪ 3. Use XFBML/API calls to show user information.
▪ 4. Publish actions to the Stream/News Feed.
▪ 5. More advanced features.

18. Objectives
▪ Main Objective: Integrate Facebook Connect into a web site
▪ 1. Register a new application with Facebook.
▪ 2. Detect the login status of a user.
▪ 3. Use XFBML/API calls to show user information.
▪ 4. Publish actions to the Stream/News Feed.
▪ 5. More advanced features.

19. Setting Up your Application
▪ 1. Go to http://www.facebook.com/developers/
▪ 2. Click “Set Up New Application”
▪ 3. Choose an Application Name, agree to Terms of Service,
submit.
▪ 4. Go to the ‘Connect’ tab and fill in ‘Connect URL’ and ‘Base
Domain’
▪ 5. Submit the form. You now have a new application!

20. Setting Up your Application (2)
▪ 1. Download a cross-domain receiver file
▪ Ex. http://www.somethingtoputhere.com/xd_receiver.htm
▪ 2. Upload xd_receiver.htm to your directory.
▪ 3. Open up the web page for development.
▪ 4. Change the <html> tag to:
▪ <html xmlns:fb="http://www.facebook.com/2008/fbml">

21. Setting Up your Application (3)
▪ 5. Insert a few lines just before the </BODY> tag:
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://
static.ak.connect.facebook.com/js/api_lib/v0.4/
FeatureLoader.js.php"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
FB.init("YOUR_API_KEY_HERE", "xd_receiver.htm");
</script>
▪ 6. And save your file.

22. Objectives
▪ Main Objective: Integrate Facebook Connect into a web site
▪ 1. Register a new application with Facebook.
▪ 2. Detect the login status of a user. (Identity)
▪ 3. Use XFBML/API calls to show user information.
▪ 4. Publish actions to the Stream/News Feed.
▪ 5. More advanced features

23. Login Status
▪ 1. Include a Facebook Connect login button:
▪ <p>
Click here to connect with Facebook:
<fb:login-button onlogin="facebook_onlogin()">
</fb:login-button>
</p>
▪ 2. Side note: What is FBML/XFBML?

24. Login Status (2)
▪ 2. Create the facebook_onlogin() function in JavaScript:
<script>
function facebook_onlogin() {
alert(FB.Connect.get_loggedInUser());
}
</script>

25. Login Status (3)
▪ 3. Simpler: Detecting status upon page load:
<script type="text/javascript">
FB.init("YOUR_API_KEY_HERE",
"xd_receiver.htm",
{"ifUserConnected" : facebook_onlogin}
);
</script>

26. Objectives
▪ Main Objective: Integrate Facebook Connect into a web site
▪ 1. Register a new application with Facebook.
▪ 2. Detect the login status of a user. (Identity)
▪ 3. Use XFBML/API calls to show user information. (Friends)
▪ 4. Publish actions to the Stream/News Feed.
▪ 5. More advanced features.

27. XFBML
▪ 1. Insert XFBML with facebook_onlogin():
function facebook_onlogin() {
fbuid = FB.Facebook.apiClient.get_session().uid;
us = document.getElementById('user_section');
us.innerHTML = ‘<fb:profile-pic uid="’+fbuid+’">’
+ ‘</fb:profile-pic>’
+ ‘<fb:name uid="loggedinuser"></fb:name>’
+ ‘has connected with Facebook.’
+ ’<br/>’
+ ’To log out: <a href="#" onclick="FB.Connect.logout(facebook_onlogout)">Click
here</a>';
FB.XFBML.Host.parseDomTree(); // Finds all XFBML tags and re-renders HTML
}

28. XFBML (2)
▪ 2. What to do when the user logs out:
function facebook_onlogout() {
us = document.getElementById('user_section');
// Reset back to the default state
us.innerHTML = 'To log in with Facebook: <fb:login-button
onlogin="facebook_onlogin()"></fb:login-button>';
FB.XFBML.Host.parseDomTree();
}

29. Objectives
▪ Main Objective: Integrate Facebook Connect into a web site
▪ 1. Register a new application with Facebook.
▪ 2. Detect the login status of a user. (Identity)
▪ 3. Use XFBML/API calls to show user information. (Friends)
▪ 4. Publish actions to the Stream/News Feed. (Distribution)
▪ 5. More advanced features.

30. Feed Forms
• User-editable comment
field
• Comment can be pre-
filled by application with
user content
• User comment will be
returned to application

31. Feed Forms (2)
• 1. Go to http://developers.facebook.com/
• 2. Click Tools in the top navigation.
• 3. Click the Feed Template Console tab.
• 4. Choose your new application from the list and click
Next.
• 5. Fill out a One Line Template + Short Story
Template Title.
• e.g. “{*actor*} reviewed a restaurant on Citysearch.”
• 6. Submit your template, and get a template ID.

32. Feed Forms (3)
// Initialize feed form data
var body_general = null;
var user_message_prompt = "How was the restaurant?";
var user_message = {value: "The restaurant was..."};
FB.ensureInit(function() {
// Show the feed form to the user
FB.Connect.showFeedDialog(<?=FEED_FORM_ID?>,
template_data, null, body_general, null,
FB.RequireConnect.require,
FB.RequireConnect.promptConnect,
user_message_prompt, user_message);
});

33. Objectives
▪ Main Objective: Integrate Facebook Connect into a web site
▪ 1. Register a new application with Facebook.
▪ 2. Detect the login status of a user. (Identity)
▪ 3. Use XFBML/API calls to show user information. (Friends)
▪ 4. Publish actions to the Stream/News Feed. (Distribution)
▪ 5. More advanced features.

34. Objectives
▪ Main Objective: Integrate Facebook Connect into a web site
▪ 1. Register a new application with Facebook.
▪ 2. Detect the login status of a user. (Identity)
▪ 3. Use XFBML/API calls to show user information. (Friends)
▪ 4. Publish actions to the Stream/News Feed. (Distribution)
▪ 5. More advanced features.
▪ Integration points on facebook.com
▪ Add server-side logic
▪ Anything that Facebook Platform can do.

35. Agenda
▪ 1. Our Mission
▪ 2. Facebook Connect, An Overview
▪ 3. Getting Started
▪ 4. What’s Next?
▪ 5. Questions

36. What’s Next?
1) Integrate
Check out our video tutorials: wiki.developers.facebook.com
2) Innovate
3) Iterate and Grow
<fb:comments>, <fb:intl>

37. Agenda
▪ 1. Our Mission
▪ 2. Facebook Connect, An Overview
▪ 3. Getting Started
▪ 4. What’s Next?
▪ 5. Questions

38. Resources
Documentation: wiki.developers.facebook.com
Help: forum.developers.facebook.com
James Leszczenski
james@facebook.com