Monday, October 15, 2007

Facebook


One of the most used social networking sites on the web is Facebook. I'd say that well over half of all students use Facebook regularly and some instituations have even started setting up their won groups for freshers so that they can meet people via the site before ever setting foot at the university.

I'm currently creating the University of Exeter's first Facebook application to inform students of important information from the site's profile section. Since I imagine more students use Facebook than the University's own site, this seems like a good way to get our information across.

Facebook apps are written mostly in PHP and hosted on the developers own server. However, the real power of Facebook development coes from using the data provided by the site, such as profile information or friends details. This can be done by using FBML (Facebook Markup Language) and FQL (Facebook Query Language) which is run on a 'canvas' page. These pages can then update the info seen on the user's profile page itself and there is even a hack to be able to change all users profile pages who have the app installed. Very powerful stuff!

I'm continuing to develop this and meeting with other academics later this week. It has the go ahead from the head of school so expect the University of Exeter on a Facebook near you soon.

Ian