Question

a client has asked me for a Facebook application similar to a news reader, that when a user reads a story, it will post on the user’s activity stream “User A read an article”, on his behalf. You may have seen this on the Guardian, Yahoo, or Washington Post FB apps.
Any ideas on how I should get started? Ideally, is there any product/SDK I can purchase to shorten the development effort?

Thanks!

Answer 1

I don’t know of a “product” as such, but what you’re talking about is Facebook’s Custom Verbs, to “Define Actions”

https://developers.facebook.com/docs/opengraph/define-actions/

There’s a good simple tutorial about the usage in issue 226 of Net Magazine.

http://www.netmagazine.com/shop/magazines/april-2012-226

I’ve not come across a tutorial as simple as that one by Googling so it might be worth the purchase – a digital version is available from the link above.

(please be aware, I’m in no way affiliated with the magazine, I just picked it up from Tescos the other night and it happens to have exactly that in it!)