Researching Your First Facebook App

It is almost impossible to find a website that does not link to Facebook (FB) allowing you to post information about their site to your account. Major websites such as Pandora.com, ABC.com, CNN.com, and IMDB.com are also using the Connect feature of FB to let users utilize their website without registering for a new account. These businesses are also going to the extent of creating either FB Custom Page Tabs or FB Custom Apps to ensure they have a presence on FB as well as the web. Most businesses are not able to do this on their own. That is when they send the call out for developers to help them out.

There are many resources available to developers in getting direction on creating their first FB App. The first and best is the FB Developers site.  This is the official FB location that collects information on how to develop and shares discussions other developers have had.

Another great article is found on the Focus.com site. There you will find useful links to pages within the FB Developers page, as well as other sites dedicated to discussing development in multiple languages, issues developers have had, and other useful links for building your own app.  I encourage you to visit the site to get ideas outside the FB site.

On the FB Developers site, you will find three major areas:

• Websites: Adding login functionality to your existing sites.
• Mobile Apps: Integrating your mobile app with FB functionality.  Currently this is only available for the iPhone and the Android systems.
• FB Apps: Writing applications to work within FB itself.

Each area gives you a rough outline of all the information you will need to get started. It does not state that you must use one specific language, but simply lets you know how FB will pass information. From there, it is up to you to decide where the base information will live, how it is set up, in what language, etc.

You will also find downloadable SDKs to incorporate into your app to allow for easy information exchange.

Hopefully this will be helpful in providing you enough information to properly layout what resources you will need before you begin to write your first app on FB.