Now a days facebook web applications developing are highly demand-able. Many companies are creating facebook fan page for their website. Some of them need customize facebook applications to promote their services and products. So the demands for facebook application developer are increasing.

In my career I’ve been developing various type of facebook applications for more than 2 years. I’ve developed many fbml canvas base application, iframe base application, fb connect base application and facebook page base application. In this site you’ll see some of my open source facebook projects and some popular facebook related articles written by me.
Now I am going to highlight how to be a facebook ninja developer.

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Some of my friends have been developing facebook application for long time and one day we all are discussing what were our mistakes in past in developing facebook application. We also have been discussing some issues of facebook. Here I’ve pointed out some part of our discussion:

Never read terms and policy by facebook

Yeah this is happened for many developers. I also did same type of mistake once ago. I violated a rule and facebook shut down my app. After this when I work any new project, I first read the latest terms and policy. Read my previous article about it . Facebook is a platform and it has some serious rules that you’ve to abide during developing your application. Visit http://developers.facebook.com/policy/ and read terms before any new application development.

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For normal web page when a page becomes too long then we use same page hyperlink. That is if we are at the bottom of the page and want to move at the top then we click a link and that moves us at the top instantly. This is done in normal website by this way

<div id="atop">.....</div>
lots of information.....
...
...
<a href="#atop">Top Page</a>

<a name="ftop"></a>
lots of information.....
...
...
<a href="#ftop">Top Page</a>

Look at the code we used <a> tag and name attribute within the <a> tag. This is the only difference for facebook application. Checkout http://www.facebook.com/pages/Thinkdiffnet/314110374728?v=app_7146470109 and move at down and click Top Page. You’ll see that page is moving slowly to the top.

According to developer roadmap by facebook this type of widget is now deprecated and any time facebook will remove this feature from application. I don’t support this decision, because widgets are one of the nice features for facebook application. Look at the birthday widget, this updates periodically when any new friend’s birthday is coming soon. And thus user becomes informed about his friends birthday.

Like this there are many good applications those use this widget feature. I don’t know why facebook deprecated this widget, because user can add/remove this type of widget according to his own wish.

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After getting some of my friends request today I developed this project and released as Open Source GPL License. This is a php, jquery base application.This applications uses the api of facebook, linkedin and twitter to update user’s status on those sites. So you’ll publish one status that will update on 3 sites instantly.

This application will be very helpful to learn fbconnect, facebook extended permission and api to update status, oAuth for twitter and linkedin authentication. And also to learn linkedin api, twitter api usage.

visit http://thinkdiff.net/demo/fblinkedtwit/index.php to see the demo.

On the right side of the demo, you’ll see FBConnect button, Give Twitter Access and Give Linkedin Access Button.

If you want to update status in facebook, after connecting the site using FBConnect you’ve to give special permission by clicking Status Update permission.  Otherwise facebook status will not update.

On the right side write something and click Update Status. If you already give access permission for facebook, linkedin and twitter your user status will update.

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Stream publish is one of the vital issue in facebook application or facebook connect base application. If you want to publish stream from your facebook application or facebook page application then you have to call

Facebook.streamPublish();

method with some parameters. If you want to publish from facebook connect base application then you have to call

FB.Connect.streamPublish()

with some parameters. One of the important parameter is the second parameter named attachment. Using this parameter you can add video, flash, text etc. This parameter actually is an object that contains text information, caption and other media like flash, music. But in text information that is called description you couldn’t use html. But suppose you have a quiz application and when user will publish stream you want some questions and answers will publish nicely. like this

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Two months ago, I developed a facebook photo gallery which is FBConnect, php, facebook api and Jquery based. Today I released the full project as open source GPL license. So you can download the full project, modify and create derivative products for your own purpose or commercial usage.

Checkout the demo of the project http://thinkdiff.net/facebook/fblatestphotos

So basically the concept of the project is simple. If you visit this app, you’ll see the latest photos from your friends in facebook. On the left side it shows which albums are recently modified. When you click the album you’ll see all the photos of that album.

Open Source Facebook Photo Gallery

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Sometimes you may need auto suggest feature for your application. And its very easy to implement in facebook application because facebook provides a FBML code for this purpose.

For example, in this post I’ll show how to auto suggest state to your users by your facebook application.

If you have a site, then you should aware to increase more traffic in any possible way. If you’re aware on it, then you could use and integrate facebook widgets in your site. Currently there are 10 widgets provided by facebook. You could visit here http://www.facebook.com/facebook-widgets/ to see all the widgets. Widgets integration is very easy. You just have to select some options and facebook will generate code that you can easily add in your site.

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Facebook will stop notification system for Application soon. That means facebook application will not send notification to its users. Instead this facebook inspires developer to send email from their application to their users. But a application couldn’t send email until user specifically provide permission. And this is one of the extended permission of facebook.

If you want to know how to prompt user for extended permission you can see my previous article http://thinkdiff.net/facebook/prompt-for-extended-permission-in-facebook-app/

In order for your application or site to get a user’s email address you have to do the following tasks:

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