first of all this is the feature I’m trying to work out:
https://developers.facebook.com/docs/opengraph/define-units/
(under the Layout Style heading)
So I’ve got a cross-platform app which has a feature to allow people to checkin to Facebook Places locations through it. Right now, the actual location publishing works great, but I’m looking to get a little more exposure on peoples’ timelines than what we have right now, which is a tiny box saying “Nabil Freeman checked into [location]” in that same small activities pane where it says “Nabil Freeman changed his political views etc.”, and an aggregation that literally says “42 checkins” and nothing else.
I really want a map aggregation where instead of highlighting a route, it shows all the pins where Nabil Freeman has checked in the past week, or month, or whatever. A bonus thing to have would be for each checkin to publish a map with a single pin onto the timeline, but the aggregation is a lot more important.
As a bonus, is there any way of embedding my own image into an aggregation? If so, I could construct my own map with Google Maps API or a similar service and just embed that.
Thanks so much for your time guys 🙂
What you described sounds possible using the Open Graph settings of your app.
For example, I made this simple “check-ins” map using a map layout aggregation:
My app’s name is “ES1”, a test app.
This shows placemarks for 5 bars that have been reviewed by a user. The mouse is hovering over “Bar Five” so a label is displayed. For this, I used the following Open Graph aggregation settings (my object ‘bar’ has custom properties ‘rating’ (int) and ‘location’ (geopoint)):
For each action (“review”), a story is published. It looks like this:
The key is to configure a “story attachment” with layout “Map”. And to see this map attachment to the story, you have to click the time-based link in the timeline unit. Here’s the timeline unit with the time-based link “about a minute ago”.
My story attachment (part of the action type config) is configured like this:
Not sure about how you would use your own custom map. Maybe you could create a custom map for each geopoint and save it as a .png then use the .png for og:image. But the map would not be interactive. Alternatively, just have the page specified by og:url contain the custom map you want.