Sharing Your Application through the News Feed
One of the easiest and best ways to get attention to your application or Web site is by sending updates to the Facebook news feeds of your users' friends (via your users' walls). The news feed is one of the most frequented parts of Facebook, and it's what all users see the minute they log in to Facebook. This is where users go to find out what their friends are doing.
The news feed is the list of stuff that your friends are doing; you see it after you log in to Facebook. That isn't to be confused with the wall, which is what your friends see when they visit your profile. As you do stuff in applications on Facebook, that stuff gets posted to your wall and then appears in your friends' news feeds. The wall and the news feed are tightly interconnected. You can view your wall at any time by clicking your name in the upper-left corner of Facebook or by clicking the Profile link (usually in the upper-right corner).
Posting to your users' news feeds is simple. In fact, it can be as simple as copying and pasting a simple social plugin (which I cover in Chapter 6) that automatically shares to their profiles. It can be some simple JavaScript that you install on your application or Web site, or it can be code that runs on your server and sends the update on behalf of your users.
For simplicity, I'm going to show you how to post to your users' ...
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