Facebook integration - not sure where to begin

I am planning to have some sort of facebook integration in my game app. I was thinking to have something like - when the user does particularly well in my game, or overcomes some obstacle for the first time, they will somehow be invited (compelled?) to have a posting on their facebook wall saying “hey I did great in the game” or some such.

I assumed that as a first step I should follow the documentation “Getting Started with the Facebook SDK for Android”. I have this all installed and ready to roll.

My problem now is that I scarcely even use facebook and am very unclear about the expected sequence of events. The facebook SDK appears so enormous and powerful that I don’t know where to begin. Presumably there is an initial stage where you get the user to “like?” your app, and maybe some second stage where you post messages to the users wall. But I’m fuzzy about what happens if the user is not logged in to their facebook app, or worse still has no facebook app on their phone at all. Does someone know of a nice blog entry that describes the kind of functionality I want? Or can someone give me some idea of where to start.

…And did I even need the whole SDK thing for the functionality I need?

I hate working with Facebook API although I only worked with their web API. They always change things and take forever to fix things.
In my games I’ve put a share button for all social things (and e-mail because it uses send intent) but it doesn’t work with Facebook. The reason is - facebook app is broken and doesn’t accept description (works with Google+ the best).

Their documentation was always helpful though for simple things - have you looked through it?

I am using Socialize in my next game: Drop-In-Simple Social Platform for Your App. Great as a ShareKit Alternative | Socialize | Socialize

If you find bugs in their SDK (like I did when FB rolled out the new v3.0 and separated permissions into two different calls)… they fix them in hours/days and can get you a temporary repo to test their changes in. SUPER, SUPER responsive!

What is their pricing? They don’t state…

From : The Socialize Blog » Socialize Pricing

“If the active userbase on any of your apps ever tops one hundred thousand users in a month, we’ll contact you to set up a custom pricing package that aligns our interests with yours”

So that is not very much… but enough that you should be bringing in a few hundred USD per month on advertising or something.

They should probably price it more in terms of average DAU over the month…

And when the price is not right? Then what? :slight_smile: Remove everything from your app and lose users because of this? :slight_smile: I wouldn’t go into this without a price up front.

Well, I would expect the price to be under $500/month. If you have hundreds of thousands of users and cannot manage to monetize a few hundred bucks a month out of them… then you have other problems :slight_smile:

decastro:

My problem now is that I scarcely even use facebook and am very unclear about the expected sequence of events. The facebook SDK appears so enormous and powerful that I don’t know where to begin. Presumably there is an initial stage where you get the user to “like?” your app, and maybe some second stage where you post messages to the users wall. But I’m fuzzy about what happens if the user is not logged in to their facebook app, or worse still has no facebook app on their phone at all. Does someone know of a nice blog entry that describes the kind of functionality I want? Or can someone give me some idea of where to start.

stackoverflow.com has lots of folks previously commenting on facebook lack of support for intents - so you have to use their facebook SDK.

However, to use the facebook SDK, you have to create an “app” - and it seems you need to create a personal facebook account to do so (i.e. based on a real identity) - as a company facebook account (which can be made and you don’t have to give your phone number etc.) with that you CANNOT make an “app” - that option does not appear.

So it seems to be a developer for facebook, you first have to sign up your personal life to them also.

If anyone knows of a way to incorporate facebook integration into an app WITHOUT having to use their personal account, that will be useful to know.

mind:

Do you need to signup with Facebook in order to use Socialize’s facebook integration - i.e. does socialize take care of that ?

  1. Pretty much… FB wants your life.

  2. Yes. Check out their SDK docs. They are really detailed (complete with screenshots of how to sign up with FB and what options to select).

Yes, it seems for facebook, you need to create an app on facebook (just as you would need to use the facebook SDK directly).

Facebook Integration ? Socialize Android SDK v2.8.2 documentation
First create a Facebook app. Go to Bei Facebook anmelden and create a new app:

It seems the “Create App” option is only available on personal facebook accounts. You cannot do that on a company facebook webpage (which doesn’t require personal info).

If one doesn’t want to “join” facebook, the other option is to create a dummy facebook account - which facebook doesn’t allow, and there have been cases of users being asked to verify that it is their account.

The question is how often do they ask users for verification - or would they do that for app creators esp. aggressively ?

Twitter is far more lenient in this regard - and you can create an app (for use with socialize etc.) more easily than facebook.

The frequency and thoroughness of verification from Facebook depends on the level of permission your app would like to access. To start getting familiar with the Facebook permissions, you can find some information here: Login - Facebook Developers. Socialize makes it easier to get things up and running, but it’s often helpful to know what’s going on behind the scenes.

On the other hand, Twitter is a bit more straight forward and easier to work with, but it’s not quite as powerful.