Find Facebook Friends with Your Facebook Connect Application

InformIT.com has just published the last article in my Facebook Connect series. This uses the common task of finding the Facebook friends of your Facebook Connect user to explain the intricacies of FQL (Facebook Query Language).

Publish stories on Facebook

In my first Facebook-related article published by InformIT, I’ve described the basics of Facebook Connect – a JavaScript API that can connect your web application with millions of Facebook users. The next step is pretty obvious: once you’ve attracted the Facebook users, it makes sense to publish their activity on your web to their Facebook news feed. The process is described in my next InformIT article “Publish Your Application Stories to Facebook”.

Use Facebook Connect to Bring Your Application to Millions of Users

Almost a year ago, I’ve joined Facebook which has at that time rolled out the initial sandbox of the Facebook Connect environment. I’ve developed a very simple application and waited for the FB Connect rollout. A few months later (around December 2008) they got so far and I’ve deployed my application on my production server … only to get user complains a while later telling me the application has stopped working.

It turned out Facebook has (somewhat silently) changed their API enough that it broke my code. However, I only had to fix a few functions to adapt them to a now better-documented API. I’ve also used a few extra bits-and-pieces Facebook engineers threw in after discovering what we really need. The second FB Connect experience was so good that I’ve decided to write a series of articles for InformIT describing how you can integrate your web site with Facebook. The first one, Use Facebook Connect to Bring Your Application to Millions of Users, has just been published on the InformIT web site.