Question

I’m making a party planner application. I’d like to send a reminder to users (who are in a certain party_id group) that their party is starting tonight

For example I’d like to send this message to everyone in the group:
“Hey don’t forget about the party at Paul’s house tonight at 9PM!”

What is the best way to send out reminders to users when a party is going to start? This would be done in an automated fashion, server running a cron job ever so often checking for new reminders to send out

Answer 1

If I were you I would do two types of notifications:

• First and most obvious is sending an email to the users.
• Second would
  be to send the user a Facebook application request.

The apprequest will show a notification next to your application name and it will also show on the top navigation panel as a notification from your application. Once the user click on that notification and comes to your application, you will have to read the notifications that user has and properly determine what to show them and then delete the notification.

Check out : http://developers.facebook.com/docs/channels

<?php 

  $app_id = YOUR_APP_ID;
  $app_secret = YOUR_APP_SECRET;

  $token_url = "https://graph.facebook.com/oauth/access_token?" .
    "client_id=" . $app_id .
    "&client_secret=" . $app_secret .
    "&grant_type=client_credentials";

  $app_access_token = file_get_contents($token_url);

  $user_id = THE_CURRENT_USER_ID;

  $apprequest_url ="https://graph.facebook.com/" .
    $user_id .
    "/apprequests?message='INSERT_UT8_STRING_MSG'" . 
    "&data='INSERT_STRING_DATA'&"  .   
    $app_access_token . "&method=post";

  $result = file_get_contents($apprequest_url);
  echo("App Request sent?", $result);
?>