I love the Facebook Platform

Of late I have been tinkering and experimenting a lot with the new Facebook Platform which has recently been released.

Firstly, I created an app that pulls the last 4 entries from a Movable Type installation, and presents the page in such a way that enables Facebook users to comment on posts, which the current 'Notes' application from Facebook does not. My app also grabbed the text and comments straight from the database rather than the RSS feed – therefore enabling a lot more functionality.

I plan to release this as a Moveable Type plug-in when I get the time to normalise the code and clean-up the appearance a little. Apart from that, the bulk of the system work is done.

The new Facebook platform in my humble opinion is excellent. It allows you a clean and consistent bridge from php (or perl, java……) to a Facebook canvas page. You can have as many canvas pages as you wish and they are essentially glorified iframes, which are hosted on apps.facebook.com/whatever.

They produce a great challenge for up-and-coming programmers (such as me) to flex their implementation skills at php, Moveable Type mark-up, and the new Facebook mark-up language – FBML.

After a little while of my app appearing on my Facebook profile, my lecturer for Programming (who is also on Facebook) liked it, and offered me to do a presentation and workshop with fellow Computer Scientist peers at University next Wednesday!

I can't wait!

Here's the Microplop.com Facebook App