Developing with the Facebook Platform & PHP

[Tami]

Developing with the Facebook Platform and PHP
By David Mytton

At the end of May this year, the Facebook team announced major changes to the package's developer tools, known as the Facebook Platform. Although the platform itself had been available for several months prior to this release, a host of new features were announced at f8, the Facebook developer event in San Francisco. This launch generated a lot of press coverage -- from the Wall Street Journal to TechCrunch. But the important question is: why should you care?

According to Alexa, Facebook is one of the top 20 sites on the Web, and it has some impressive statistics:

* The site's growth is around 3% per week, which equates to 100,000 new users per day.
* 50% of registered users visit the site every day.
* The site attracts more traffic than eBay: 40 billion page views per month, which equates to an average of 50 pages per user, per day.

Just looking at these statistics should start you thinking about the ways in which you can leverage this level of traffic to benefit your own web site. If you could tap into the Facebook userbase, you could very easily and quickly increase the audience's awareness of your brand, product, service, or web site.

Let's consider a real-world example. I'm currently working on welovelocal.com, a UK directory that allows its users to find and review businesses. While this isn't necessarily a new idea, the site adds a social element whereby users can view reviews from their friends to find out about businesses that other users with similar interests are reviewing. And by leveraging Facebook, a site like this can significantly increase its exposure to a given user's network of friends.

For example, if Stacy, a welovelocal user, writes a review about a restaurant, that review will be published to Stacy's Facebook news feed. All of Stacy's friends on Facebook will be able to see that she's written a new review, and can click through to welovelocal to read it.

Can you see the potential?

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