We Love The Web - Blogorhea

Very simply: almost anything except the things you'd expect to be easy.

Your Facebook fanpage is made out of frame that facebook supply and a page on your own server that gets pulled into that frame whenever someone looks at the fanpage.So, realistically, it can contain almost anything.

This bit comes from Facebook.

This bit comes from a page on your website.

We make magic spells and the two are combined.

So, your fanpage is mostly a normal web page that Facebook pulls in remotely using magic spells that we cast to make it all work. What most of our customers want is to get access to all those lovely people who 'like' you and interact with you. And that's down to making your facebook page relevant and valuable to your customers. I'll start to scratch at the surface of that in another post. For now, this is the 'mechanical' how-to.

There are a couple of rules about accessing people's details that will probably surprise and annoy you though: they are the opposite of what you'd expect.

You can:

• Do almost everything you can with a normal web page, albeit one limited to 740x588 in size.
• Make a different set of stuff display once someone 'Likes' you
• Collect information using normal web-based forms. So, you can ask for people's email address, inside leg measurements and get them to enter a competition, but you can't automatically 'harvest' information from their profiles.
• If you want to gain access to people's profiles then you build an application such as this one:
  http://apps.facebook.com/hovis-stop-snacking/?ref=appd_my_recent&fa=1.
• People have to give permission for you to access their profiles. The deal is this: you give people something they want and they, in return, hand over their name, permission to message them, post on their wall, access to their list of friends, messages they've posted, profile, phone numbers and private innermost thoughts. Seems like a good deal.

You can't:

• Get access to someone's facebook profile name, addresses or profile details directly from a fan page.
• This is the annoying one, because it's the one that everyone asks for. Gathering this info has to be done through a facebook app. and these don't live on the fan page.
  • Facebook apps. are a slightly different beast and they can't be on your Facebook homepage. They have to be on a separate tab or linked from the fanpage.

One more thing to note:
Facebook change things. A lot. Like, all the time. They've probably changed everything at least twice since you started reading this. When I'm doing research on anything facebook related, I tell Google to ignore any page older than 6 months old.

And Facebook Connect? Oh, I think I've written enough for this mini how-to. I'll cover that soon too.

Bootnote:
D'you know what? It's getting harder and harder to shoehorn in an insult to comic sans, the world's ugliest typeface. Hmm... your suggestions welcome for how to do this more effectively.