I’ll be there this afternoon. I believe there are at least 180 people showing up but there are only 100 seats available, so I better get there early. I bet I get to meet really interesting people there.
Building facebook apps has been one of my recent fields of interests. We usually build a web application and then think about populating it with users, on facebook we already get a large database of more than 40 million users, so now how can we say no to that!
It is possible to build FB applications using all the existing frameworks such as Joomla, Drupal, or Ruby on Rails and such. There are some differences of course, for example instead of HTML the output is going to be Facebook Markup Language ( FBML ). If you are curious, just get a FB developer account and attend few of these events. You’d be surprised what independent developers are cooking up these days.
I am already receiving ideas and inquiries from my Marketer friends. Although I must admit I still haven’t seen any real useful FB application yet. Most of them do not go beyond silly online group games. Even Facebook staff are still experimenting with the API and refining the concept using constant community feedback.
In case you wanted to make the event even more populated, here is the address:
Vancouver Film School (VFS) Theatre 1
420 Homer Street between Pender and W. Hastings
Vancouver, BC
5:30 – 9:00 PM – Tuesday October 23rd 2007
and here is the Facebook group for this event.
Did you get a chance to attend? If so, how was it? Look forward to hearing more about J! and Facebook.
I did, and it was loads of fun. I made many new friends there too, including Boris Mann, he is one of the Drupal guys and a big advocate of Open ID. He told me he had met with Johan Janssens and bunch of other Joomla Core developers in person too.
I haven’t seen any examples of Joomla Facebook apps, but if it can be done in Drupal, I am 100% sure it can be done in Joomla too. I actually have an inquiry for a FB app in my mailbox, it could be the first JFB application that I build.
I just finished programming a JFB application – it’s an addition to jevents, which was already in use by the site. I added a simple new ajax ‘attend’ functionality for jevents and a new tab for these events in Community Builder. This list of events you are ‘attending’ can be added to your facebook profile, and soon I’ll have the FB ‘invite-a-friend’ working on it.
If you already have an account on the J! site, one sign-in to the J! site from facebook adds your FB id to the CB database, and you’re automatically logged into the J! site from FB.
It can be done, but a warning, the FB documentation is awful.
That’s awesome Jonathan! I knew someone would start building a JFB app pretty soon. What is it called ? I like to install it and tried if you don’t mind.
And also where is your company “Unhindered Technology” located. Pretty impressive portfolio!
Is there any news about facebook and joomla anything coming out???
I haven’t heard anything yet. If I do, I’ll make sure to post examples here.