FBML Essentials

Virally Promoting Your App With FBML

The following section describes several tags that you can use to virally promote your application. One of the strengths of Facebook is the rich access it provides to friends lists, and the tools it offers for promoting applications through those friends. As an application developer, with just knowledge of FBML you can do many things to spread your app to others on Facebook very quickly.

Request and Notification Tags

Notification tags require some API knowledge and access, but as you saw in the “Hello Friends” example in Chapter 1, with request tags you can create simple invite forms using just a series of FBML tags.

Feed Forms

Feed forms are another shortcut you can take for virally spreading your application. By adding a simple fbtype attribute to your form, Facebook will intercept your form submission and present the user with a dialog box that asks if the user would like to publish a news item to either their Mini-Feed or their friends’ News Feeds. The code referenced in the action parameter of the form should return JSON data in the form of a News Feed template. The following is an example of the form you submit. Notice the fbtype attribute in the form (you can also see this in action in the FBML Essentials app on Facebook):

<form fbtype="feedStory" action= "http://fbmlessentials.staynalive.com/index.php"> <input type="text" name="status" value="" /> <input type="hidden" name="submit" value="1" /> <input type="hidden" name="action" value="feedforms" ...