Mike Griffiths

The title says it all, really. Football Badges has hit the 2,000 members mark and is still going strong. It actually jumped up by 150 since the last time I checked a few days before.

Check it out if you haven’t already. And if you like this then have a look at Football Feeds too.

Football Badges

As you may be aware from reading this blog I have recently been using the Facebook Framework to develop two applications, Football Badges and University Badges. At time of writing both applications are doing reasonably well – Football Badges has 1,100 users and University Badges has 30 – but University Badges was only accepted into the application directory a few days ago.

While using the framework the main issue I found with it, as with a lot of frameworks and APIs, is the distinct lack of documentation. I have experience developing with a lot of different web applications, and it’s never normally a suprise to find something poorly documented, but I thought something as mainstream as the Facebook Framework would be an exception. Although there is documentation available, it is in the form of a wiki – which can work fine, but this wiki is clearly not maintained very well and is left up to developers to guess a lot of the frameworks functionality. Take for example the page that is aimed at helping developers to create a box on users profile pages, the majority of the wiki page is taken up by a huge conversation had on the Facebook IRC help channel on Freenode where a user was trying to update their profile box. Where this may be a little helpful, it’s highly unprofessional. All Facebook needs to do is to donate a few days of one of their framework developers time to properly write up the documentation and they will likely attract hundreds of new developers and successful applications.

One problem I have also found with the framework is the way it handles user profiles. Everything is cached on Facebook’s servers before it is shown on the users profile page, this greatly limits the kind of applications that you can create. For example, if I want to create an application that keeps track of how many visitors a user has had on their profile, I would normally display a 1×1 transparent gif and track how many times it is loaded from my server, but because everything is cached on Facebook’s servers it will only ever be loaded once from my server. You can only use set HTML items too, I fully understand the reasoning for this, as otherwise applications would go overboard and Facebook would soon turn into MySpace, but perhaps Facebook could grant additional privledges to trusted developers to try and enhance the users experience.

Another problem is that users must actively choose to add an application to their profile page. This is probably for the best as otherwise all applications would add huge boxes to user profiles to generate more traffic. It does, however, pose problems for applications like mine that are based around the profile page. It can be very mis-leading to a user, let me explain: A user see’s my application and adds it. Any normal user would now think they have a Football Badge on their profile page, they’d be wrong. The user then has to click the ‘Add to profile’ button on my applications pages. I have made it blindingly obvious what to click to try and ensure 100% of my users do it, but it does divert attention away from the application itself and is an unnessesary step for applications like mine.

I have also noticed some problems with the frameworks deployment. My applications are relatively small in comparison to a lot of the applications out there, but I too have noticed problems. The servers don’t seem to be kept up-to-date, especially recently. I have around 1,100 users on my Football Badges application, normally I get around 15 new users a day. Last week there were reported to be no new users, then this week there were 150 users added in a day. I doubt this is an anomally, especially after scanning the forums and finding a lot of others having the same problem, some of whom are developing applications with millions of users, not thousands.

A lot of people have raised concerns about privacy issues with the platform. Anyone can apply for a developers license and it’s all automated so there is no vetting. You only need 20 users in order to submit the application to the app directory so that it is searchable and addable by all. Once you have your developer key you gain access to nearly every piece of data Facebook has on their users, this seems like a massive concern. However, I don’t see it that way. Users must grant privledges to the application before it can access anything. The user can also limit what the app can see and use. Even if the user grants the application full access, it will only be able to use what friends can see on their profile so for the majority of users, this isn’t even an issue. I can, however, see a problem for the security conscious. Facebook allows users to pick whether their profiles are crawlable or not by Google and other search engines. I personally chose to hide mine. If an application is granted privledges to access that user data there is no telling what they can do with it. The developers can easily create an application that stores your information on their servers when you access one of their application’s pages and there is no way of stopping them.

With all that said the Facebook Framework is very fersatile and does allow developers access to user data in a relatively safe way. The amount of applications that could be developed are endless, even with the profile restrictions in place, and the platform has paved the way for many new businesses. I myself have made money from these two small applications, so it clearly works. I just hope that Facebook decides to put some time into their documentation sooner rather than later.

The latest addition to the new sports feeds network is Rugby Feeds which I put live late last night. Similar to Cricket Feeds and the ever-increasingly popular Footy Feeds, Rugby Feeds will make an excellent addition to the network.

My next job is to create an RSS aggregator which will take all of the stories from the different feeds and create one comprehensive feed – the trick here is to make sure stories aren’t repeated… tricky.

Rugby Feeds – Rugby news to your screen

In addition to the Footy Feeds website I have also created the Cricket Feeds website. The design has been kept deliberately similar. If the website proves to be popular then other sites will be added to the network, possibilities include Tennis feeds, Rugby feeds and sport feeds – the later encompassing the most popular feeds from all of the sports.

As I have said in my previous post, if the site(s) prove to be popular I will add additional functionality, allowing regular users to change which feeds they see and add their own. I’ll also create an RSS feed of all of the feeds I load in, allowing the user to use their own RSS reader rather than being limited to my website.

Cricket Feeds – Cricket news to your screen

Love football? I know plenty of people who do. One problem is though, there isn’t one central place where you can get all the news about the football world. Sure you can go to the BBC news website and see some of the news, but this isn’t everything. I spent five minutes visiting various sites and I noticed that if you want to know everything then you need to go to at least 4 different sites to get a comprehensive look at it all.

This is where the idea of Footy Feeds has come from. Essentially it’s just an RSS aggregator, grabbing news from various websites and displaying the ten latest posts all in one place – but it’s very useful. I’m not a huge football fan and I still use it.

At the moment the site is based on four set feeds which are the one’s I found to be the best. However, if the site takes off a little I will make it customisable, allowing the user to add as many feeds as they want and allow the user to select which feeds they want to display from a set available, or alternatively set their own feed URLs.

Footy Feeds – Football news to your screen