We have an application that lets users challenge their friends in various challenges. Right now we issue the challenge by posting a message to their friends wall. This functionality will be removed in february so we need to find another way of issuing the challenge. What are the alternatives available?
We want the friend to get notified that the challenge has taken place and that some kind of story is generated on some wall.
We have looked at open graph actions and the mention tagging there must be done by the user herself so we can’t use that to mention the selected friend. And we cant use action tagging since this is not an event that has or is happening.
It might be possible to use an open graph action referencing the built in “Profile (External)” object, but that seems to be rather messy – we just want to reference the facebook user. And we don’t know if the friend would get notified of this – probably not.
The story could be published to the users own wall, but we really want the friend to be mentioned and notified.
It seems to be a rather standard use case for applications – does facebook provide this functionality anymore?
Edit: I’m thinking that maybe invoking the javascript feed dialog with a from and to setting might work. Then the user can also write a personal message for the challenge, and it should show up at both walls?
The best way to do this is by using a request: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/requests/
Of course it will not be public then, but after all it´s a direct action between the user and his friend and other users might see this as spam.
The other way (and the second best, i guess) is to use mention tagging:
https://developers.facebook.com/docs/technical-guides/opengraph/mention-tagging/
You could use Open Graph to post a dynamic link, if the mentioned user clicks on it > challenge accepted. If any other user clicks on it, he will just get redirected to the main app page.
…another idea, which is probably the very best: