Facebook® Application Development For Dummies®

Creating Your Own Application in Five Minutes

Creating your first application is surprisingly easy, and you can have a simple app set up in the Facebook.com environment in just five minutes! If you follow along with the examples in this chapter, I show you how to create the basic foundations of an application that allows users to share, collect, and organize inspiring quotes with their friends. This enables your users to, more than just sharing on and reading your wall, organize and see the quotes by what their friends are sharing, rather than reading a static list of quotes like a traditional Web site provides. The power of Facebook Platform is that you have the capability to provide full relevance for the user surrounding his or her experience in your application. Rather than having to search for quotes, the user can immediately see what his friends are sharing, and choose from that rather than having to guess what he might like to see.

Minute 1: Set up your application

Follow these steps to name your app and add some simple settings — for example, telling Facebook what path to follow when people want to visit your application:

1. On the Developer page, click the Set Up New App button.

   You arrive at an Essential Information page that looks a lot like what is shown in Figure 2-4.

2. Type a name for your application in the Application Name text box.

   Your app name can be almost anything — it doesn't even have to be unique. But you probably want to pick something that describes your application ...