Facebook Badge Application

[beerinator]

I have started building a facebook badge application that displays very similar (in fact almost the same) information as the user badges that we now have available for blogs.



I doubt it will be too popular, since it is so site centric, but if it influences one or two people to find craft beer (and this site!), then it will be worth the morning I spent working on it.

The application is not open for business just yet, but I will announce it here and on the beer mapping facebook group when it is finished and ready for use.

Any comments or ideas about applications for facebook?

[beerinator]

Here is the beta facebook application;
http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=6142273795

I haven't actually submitted it to facebook yet because I really have only tested in on one other profile (and we found a fairly large bug!).  But I believe everything might be fixed up now.

The majority of my time in working on this has been spent trying to figure out that facebook applications residing on a profile page can not update themselves automatically.  There has to be either some interaction with the user (click a button or submit a form) or you can write some automatic scripts that will work in the background on your own server to update everyone's profile.

So currently you can add the application and tie it to your profile easily.  But it doesn't refresh automatically.  The owner of the profile (you) will have to hit the refresh button in order to update the content on your badge.  I will work on getting the script to update automatically, but it sort of requires some strange workarounds to get around facebook's system.

[jonnyipa]

Nice work.  I must have not refreshed facebook because those stats look a little low!
 

[BeerSox]

I added it!

[beerinator]

I have tested and written the code to update your profiles remotely.  Each user will still have the "refresh" button that only they can see, but I will probably set up the application to update every night or possibly a couple times a day.  So your badge will be updated nightly but you could still refresh it during the day if that was important for you.

I have released the application into the wild!  Nothing can stop us now!


Also, I have considered building a brewery/brewpub application that is loosely tied into Beer Mapping.  Maybe add a "suggest a brewpub" type of option so people can scatter the application.  I would make it very simple for facebook possibly with a "I have visited this many breweries" display for your profile.  The ultimate goal would be to draw a few people deeper into the site as more dedicated users.

There are 50+ million active users on facebook.  There have to be a few users in there we can gather up.

[beerinator]

By the way, if you don't read the front page you may not see that I have almost completed a more sophisticated facebook application dedicated to visiting and commenting on breweries and brewpubs:
http://beermapping.com/2007/12/04/breweries-ive-visited-facebook-application-teaser/

I forgot to include an image on the front page displaying where the maps go, so here is an example of that (note this image is from before a few other features were added so it looks a bit different now).