Monthly Archives: September 2007

By now you’re probably familiar with college courses being taught about Youtube or in Second Life, but last Thursday began something new: a college course taught at Stanford University on Facebook applications. Cramming over 100 students into a temporary classroom, professor BJ Fogg wrote the following in the Stanford Persuasive Technology blog about his class:

We’re focusing on the psychology and metrics of Facebook, and how understanding these two pieces can help developers create superior applications on Facebook–or on whatever platform opens up next (and apparently more are coming soon).

What’s new here is how Facebook Platform has brought the creator and user close together through Facebook product features like Reviews and Discussion Boards, as well as built-in metrics of uptake and engagement. Anyone can see exactly how people are responding to a Facebook app, both individually and collectively.

BJ Fogg and Dave McClure have framed this course well by probing the relationship of creators and users in these applications. And while the course itself focuses on Facebook applications, I imagine that many of the discussions could be extrapolated and applied to other trends in web applications that are moving toward similar models. The class’ second assignment is to create a Facebook application that aids teaching and learning – it will be especially interesting to see the outcomes of this. Can similar observations for commercial applications be applied to educational apps? And, as I brought up in a previous post regarding Facebook apps that libraries are beginning to develop, is it possible to cross an “invisible line between school and cool?” In what ways do the approaches of these applications differ from other applications?

If you’re interested in the class, they’ve set up a public Facebook group (now exceeding 500 members) and have their course syllabus online. Hat tip to Amy Stephen at Open Source Community for sharing this.

Edit 01/07/09: I’m no longer involved with the majority of development of WPBook.  There’s a great team currently working on it, and we have a Google group where questions/problems can be fielded by active community members.

My foray into WordPress development is WPBook, an easy-to-install and fully customizable plugin that creates a Facebook application mirroring the content of your self-hosted blog. I want to briefly discuss several things, including how I created it, what it can do now, and where I see this going in the future.

What is WPBook
WPBook is a WordPress plugin that mirrors the content of your blog in the Facebook canvas, visible within their site’s template. Users of the social networking site can then view and/or add the application. Right now there are two blogs running the plugin that you can check out: my application called Finding America, and Jeremy Boggs’ History 120 application. I’ve taken a screen capture of the very simple template hack I performed to control the display of the blog on Facebook’s site. Also, notice how a quick-link to my blog is listed under Applications on the left side of the screen.

Developing WPBook
This is the first WordPress plugin I’ve created, but I think it’s worth saying how simple this was to create. There were several hurdles; including automatically mirroring the content on a static page with a separate template, but in the end the solution I came up with is very straightforward. After discovering Facebook’s update_option and wp_insert_post functions, I saved myself many lines of code by stripping out SQL statements and unnecessary logic. I’d love feedback from WP plugin developers on how to make this better.

Why a Facebook Application
I’ve noticed two trends in higher education: 1) professors are using and exploring blogs as a medium for communicating with students 2) given the vast reach of social networking sites, there has been increased interest in educational application for Facebook. Several months ago I blogged about libraries on Facebook, and since then there has continued to be an increase of these apps. My hope is that this plugin can help to move both of those closer together, and also engage students in new ways with additional features.

The Future of WPBook

The current version of WPBook displays the content of your blog in the Facebook, and makes it easy to access for your readers on Facebook. Future versions of WPBook will take advantage of the social features of Facebook and its development platform. While I haven’t nailed down the specifics, I hope to provide the option of sending notifications to users of your app once you’ve posted a new message, and also allow users to comment directly via their Facebook ID.

Download and Install WPBook
I have uploaded version .4, which you can download now. Included in that zipped file is a readme with four easy steps to set up your own. Note that one of the steps requires for you to obtain an application key and secret key from Facebook’s developer application; if this is unclear in the readme, I’ll update it with more details. WPBook is definitely in beta, but based upon my testing with several installations it’s stable. If you have any questions or suggestions, leave a comment on this post.

Happy blogging

Edit 10/12/07: I’ve added WPBook to WordPress’ plugin directory. Check there for updates as I continue to improve it. http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wpbook/