Facebook Cookbook

Story Aggregation

Problem

I’ve heard that Facebook aggregates stories together, but I don’t know what that means.

Solution

If your app is growing in popularity and you have multiple users who are connected through part of the social graph, Facebook will aggregate the stories from your app about a given user’s friends, and that aggregated story will have a much higher chance of showing up in their feed. You’ve likely seen this happen with Facebook’s own stories, particularly about things such as Profile picture changes. Any of your stories that are published using the same registered template bundle can be aggregated automatically.

Discussion

Let’s take a look at an example of aggregation. If our handy old Super Disco Napping application developed the ability to report on the post-napping brunch adventures of its users, it might publish a News story something like the one shown in Figure 9-11.

Figure 9-11. News story, non-aggregated

Note

The delicious photo of a delicious-looking plate of French toast is courtesy of urbanshoregirl, who published it on Flickr under a Creative Commons license. You can find the original photo at http://flickr.com/photos/urbanshoregirl/101749649/.

That’s pretty interesting and might attract my friends’ attention if it made it into their News Feeds, but it has to compete against all the other stories out there, so the odds are pretty slim (which I won’t be after ...