Getting Started: Understanding Integration Into Facebook

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There are many ways to join, interact with, and make experiences in the Facebook ecosystem, including Groups, Pages, Events, and most importantly to developers - Applications, Connect, and the Facebook API.

Using Facebook's APIs, a developer can use Facebook's data to enhance the experiences they're building for users. Developers can pull Facebook's data into their own website, device, or use it within their own Page Application Tabs or Canvas Pages on Facebook.com. This guide is meant for developers investigating integrations into Facebook.com.

Contents

How It Works

In order to protect users' privacy and data, the use of Facebook data is mostly abstracted and handled on Facebook's side, so that developers can build applications which call Facebook data without having to store it themselves or determine who is allowed to see it. To see how your app can fetch data and display it to users, see this quick guide.

Putting the experience into Facebook.com requires setting up an 'application', which is a framed view of a website using your callback URL as the source. You can choose to either iFrame your site, or build an experience just for Facebook that makes use of Facebook's FBML (Facebook Markup Lanugage)]]. This guide can help you decide which you want to do.

Besides content produced just for canvas pages or tabs, you can also allow users to push content to friends' Streams, and allow users to post attachments from your app directly from their Publisher. This content will be visible to all of a user's friends, and is a great way to help a user spread your content.

Another way to further allow a user to spread your application is through direct Invites and Requests. These appear on friends' home pages and link those friends directly to your application. You can also use Notifications to alert users to activity happening within your application. These notifications appear on the friends' home pages as well, and this functionality can also be used to send the user emails.

Because you've built within Facebook, users will also be able to bookmark your app within Facebook so that they can return easily.

Altogether, these integration points should be a good start in helping you understand the different ways in which users can use your app and Facebook to share your content with their friends.

Next Steps

Read and follow these steps for Creating a Platform Application. Make sure you understand the basic Anatomy of a Facebook App.

Other things you may want to do when you’re done:

  • Familiarize yourself with the FBML docs
  • Learn what the various API calls can do

Reference Docs

Policies and Terms

To ensure Facebook remains a safe and comfortable place for users and developers alike, Facebook has established a series of Platform Guidelines every developer must adhere to. Please be sure to read through this carefully - you do not want to have to re-write your application because of a violation of the terms! Facebook assumes every developer has agreed to this when they first configure their website, iPhone app, or desktop application:

Questions?

For those with questions or issues while developing their Facebook Connect integrations, Facebook has provided the following resources, which should enable you to get all the information you need should a problem arise. We recommend searching through our documentation before asking, but these resources are always available and at your disposal:

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