Karsten Januszewski on 'facebook'

Updates to Flotzam

Karsten Januszewski — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 00:37:00 GMT

I realized that the code base I used for Flotzam for the MIX conference was not posted and there are a few interesting things that have been updated in the code that people may be interested in:

For MIX, we displayed photos that were posted to the MIX event on Facebook. How do you get all photos from an event from Facebook? Officially, there isn't an API for this. Unofficially, it can be done through FQL by simply calling photos.get and passing the event id. I extended the Facebook .NET wrapper and added a method called GetEventPhotos that does this. The reason this is interesting is if you want to use Flotzam at a conference and want to access the photos from a Facebook event.
I also added a setting that allows you to choose whether to show photos from Facebook friends or show photos from an event or both.
Another thing we did at MIX was to show all twitters from anyone following the event. I didn't have this officially wired up in the settings, but now it is. It is a little confusing: if you pick, "watch me and my friends" you are seeing the tweets of people you follow. But if you pick "watch my followers" you are getting the last tweet of anyone who is following you. It is kind of goofy because the APIs return a different schema depending on which you pick, so the code has to do some casting between .NET types, since I serialize everything.
I've also added a setting so you can either choose to have the skins randomly toggle or you can just stick with one skin.
I've also gone ahead and uploaded the source code with the .PNG sequences done by Jeremiah Morrill. With all those images, the download is 50 mb. As such, I've made one version of the project that doesn't have the .PNG sequences which is smaller.

Download the code with PNG sequences.

Download the code without PNG sequences.

Facebook and .NET

Karsten Januszewski — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 00:19:00 GMT

Recently found out about a couple cool Facebook projects worth checking out built on the Facebook Toolkit (which is the #4 most downloaded project on Codeplex of over 3000 projects):

Synchronizer 1.0 by Lutz Roeder - Synchronizer is a Facebook desktop application that allows you to synchronize profile pictures, birthdays and work info with your Outlook contact list. It also allows you to create Outlook contact items for existing Facebook friends and matches them if named differently.

Facebook Data Store Client API - Facebook has a beta distributed Data Store accessible through REST web services. There is already a provisional PHP client API in existence, but there is no C# API - until now!

Welcome to the (Open)Social

Karsten Januszewski — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 21:55:00 GMT

I've spent the morning playing with OpenSocial. After all, OpenSocial fits in with my conceptualization of the rhizohm and my general interest in web APIs. Plus, I want to be ready to get at all that data on MySpace. I'm always interested in abstractions of data, which is really what the APIs attempt to do (What is part of a person object? An activity object? etc.), not unlike what WinFS was attempting to tackle, in terms of creating schema that everyone adheres to, or, to go back a PDC or two, Hailstorm.

The beginning of my research was attempting to play with the API and look for implementations to see things working. This was an exercise in futility as the sites that actually implement a sandbox for the API's seem to be pretty darned flaky. The only gadgets that I could get to work were "static" gadgets; I was never actually able to see data from one site appear on another site (list of friends, activities, etc.) It is alpha code after all, a 0.5 release. Nonetheless, my conclusion at this point is, from a development point of view, it is pretty much unusable. I imagine the Orkut implementation is a more solid, but I haven't been approved to play there yet. I applied for the Orkut sandbox but haven't heard back yet.

So, after that exercise, I then started reading the various posts in the blogosphere. Perhaps the best was from Dare Obasanjo whose technical and business critique was on the money I thought. He links out to several other bloggers who had some pretty insightful commentary, in fact so much so that I have nothing to add. I did find his link out to Russell Beattie amusing, again hearkening back to the Hailstorm backlash.

I still wonder about the other option for data retrieval, best encapsulated by what the guys are up to over at dapper.net: the notion of the semantic web through strongly typed screenscraping of HTML. This is a different approach than the Facebook approach (closed system) or the OpenSocial approach ("open"* system), in that it doesn't attempt to try to schematize data. This gets back to that argument: you can't fight the web. It will proliferate rhizomatically.

*See Shelley Powers piece on terms for more on what "open" means in this case.

Facebook Desktop Explorer

Karsten Januszewski — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 23:55:00 GMT

It bothers me when there is a great sample application available, but no one can get to it unless they are a developer who downloads the source and compiles the application. Such is the case with a desktop application that is part of the Microsoft Facebook Developer Toolkit called Facebook Desktop Explorer. The application allows you to browse Facebook friends, photos and events. It also maps all Facebook friends to Microsoft Virtual Earth.

I've used ClickOnce to publish the application and make it simple for people to install from the web. Go check it out! Here are some screenshots to give you a sense of the application: