Its got to the stage where I can no longer read Mashable or Techcrunch because of the saturation and influence that these so called ‘social media’ experts and journalists seem to be having on the industry. This so called next movement has unfortunately made everyone (even my Mum and Dad!) an expert in social media (whatever social media really is?) so it seems. I used to be an avid reader of Mashable and Techcrunch however i started to notice articles that were just plain crap observations, for example recently i found this post on Mashable, ‘The top ten Twitter trends this week.’ I mean WHAT THE HELL! This made it into an article! This is a classic example of so called social media biting itself in the ass. Im a savvy internet user if i want to know what’s trending on Twitter i’ll check the Twitter homepage. Social media really just stands for, ‘We’re going to make your browsing experience twice as complicated by bombarding you with pointless facts an figures and plain obvious tips on how to promote your business using Twitter, Facebook and social networking.’ I mean HELLO! bands and teenagers have been doing this stuff for years on MySpace, Hi5, and Bebo its nothing new.

It’s just plain marketing bullshit, and it just purports to makes anyone an expert if you have a Twitter or Facebook account, so in effect it just bastardises people who actually are knowledgeable in this area. I don’t class myself as an expert in anything. If your an expert you have nothing more to learn and we all have something to learn even more so on the internet.

Social Media = Way too much noise!

The Competition

Papermashup has teamed up with EasyPHPWebsites.com to give away three free copies of the e-book (including access to the videos). Find out more about the book here
Competition closes on the 14th of December 2009 with the three winners being announced shortly after the closing date. There is no cash alternative and no purchase necessary.

How To Enter

This competition is now closed!

1. To enter simply post the below on twitter and we’ll pick three people from random. Couldn’t be easier!
@ashleyford & @wjgilmore are giving away free copies of Easy PHP Websites with the Zend Framework. RT to enter http://twi.la/ew8zt

A key tool for any budding web developer is API knowledge. It’s good to familiarise yourself with a variety of application interfaces. I started out using the Twitter REST API with PHP and CURL when twitter first launched the API to basically get a users tweets, pretty simple now I look back, but at the time it was the first time i’d done such a thing. As the development of social media continues this will increasingly open up opportunities to develop more and more applications that interact with one another and and make our daily chores more eventful.

Frameworks

There’s generally a framework for just about every programming language out there. Whether you decide to learn the jQuery framework for JavaScript or Cake for PHP each one will help you succeed as a freelancer and further your career as a web developer. Frameworks in many respects take out the arduous repetitive tasks we face daily and give us more time to focus on developing cutting edge products or applications.

iPhone Applications

Companies are Increasingly seeing the massive potential that there is in the mobile platform. Applications that are approved and make it into the Apple app store have the opportunity to be downloaded thousands of times and can potentially make a lot of money. Having a specific skill to be able to develop for this market can be very lucrative, especially in the current economic climate when companies are turning to social media to plug holes where they’re not seeing return on investment from other advertising sectors.

CMS Customisation

A handy skill to have is a general knowledge of how to use content management systems. For example building themes and plugins for WordPress, or modules and components for Joomla and Mambo. As a developer its important to have an idea of the structure of a variety of CMS’s. If you have a wordpress blog/site, that’s an easy way to familiarise yourself with the platform. Remember it’s always easier to learn something by immersing yourself in the technology.

Online Payments

Businesses are always going to need payment solutions online. Having the skills to take a site and integrate paypal or google checkout will allow you to go far. We’re starting to see many 3rd party software companies setting up and selling software at more affordable prices, take Panic for example. They are a relatively small company that develop a selection of web development software for the mac. Many new startups are settling for a product based revenue stream rather than making money purely through ads, revenue share, or partnership deals. This opens up the demand for skilled developers to be able to build payment solutions.

So to get started you need to head over to Facebook and create a new application

Below are the steps to setting up an application on Facebook.

Firstly navigate to the Facebook developer homepage to register your application

Choose a name for your app and agree to the Terms

Your application key along with your secret is displayed on the next page

Click connect in the menu to add the URL to which your application will be hosted

You now need to put your API key in here.

The complete Facebook connect demo code is below. Lets take a look at it. In this example we’re simply authenticating a facebook user with javascript and posting their comment to the users news feed using the API. We also need to include a cross domain receiver file which allows us to transfer data between our domain and Facebook platform. If the user is authenticated we pull in their name, avatar, and profile url, and hide the name input field and facebook connect login button. Now when the user submits a comment (after the javascript alert which is there for demo purposes) they are given the option to post the comment to their newsfeed. Check out the video from the facebook connect developers below which explains how to setup the json code to dynamically update their newsfeed.

Facebook Connect and Newsfeeds Video

Final Code

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
<title>Facebook demo</title>
    <script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.3.2/jquery.min.js"></script>

    <script>
    function auth_fb() {

  var viewer  = FB.Facebook.apiClient.fql_query(

      'SELECT name, pic_square_with_logo ,profile_url FROM user WHERE uid='+FB.Facebook.apiClient.get_session().uid,

      function(results) {
        load_data(      results[0].name,
                        results[0].pic_square_with_logo,
                        results[0].profile_url,
                        'FB.Connect.logoutAndRedirect("./index.html");return false;')
      });
}

function load_data(name, image, url, logout) {

  $('#userbox').html( "<a href='"+url+"'>"
                    + "<img alt='"+name+"' src='"+image+"' /></a>"
                    + "<div id='ubname'><a href='"+url+"'>" + name + " logged in with Facebook Connect</a></div> "
                    + "<a href='./index.html' onclick='" + logout + "'>logout</a>" ).show();
   $('div#submit').html( "<input type='submit' id='sub' onClick='fb_reg(); return false;' value='Post Comment' />");

  $('#name').val(name);
  $('#url').val(url);
  $('#image').val(image);
  $('#userinfo').hide();

}

    </script>

</head>

<body>

          <form id="comment-form">
            <div id="userbox" style="display:none;"></div>

            <div id="userinfo">

              <div class="login"><fb:login-button size="large" background="white" length="long" onlogin="auth_fb();"></fb:login-button></div>

              Name: <br/><input id="name" name="name" type="text" />
              <input id="url" name="url" type="hidden" />
              <input id="image" name="image" type="hidden" />

            </div>
            <div class="clear"></div>
            <div class="comment-cont">
              Comment:<br />
              <textarea name="comment" cols="40" id="comment-text"></textarea>
            </div>
            <br/>
            <div id="submit"><input type="submit" id="sub" onclick="nor_reg(); return false;" value="Post Comment" /></div>
          </form>

    <script src="http://static.ak.connect.facebook.com/js/api_lib/v0.4/FeatureLoader.js.php" type="text/javascript"></script>
    <script type="text/javascript">

function nor_reg(){

	if($('#comment-text').val() == ""){
  alert("All fields are required");
}else{

	 alert("post the data to the database");

	}}

function fb_reg(){	

if($('#comment-text').val() == ""){
  alert("All fields are required");
}else{

var text = $("#comment-text").val();
var data = {"comment": text};

FB.Connect.showFeedDialog(102888283195, data);

 alert("post the data to the database");

}
}

	 FB.init("YOUR_API_KEY_GOES_HERE", "xd_receiver.html", {"ifUserConnected" : auth_fb});
    </script>

</body>
</html>

Mark Zuckerburg launched Facebook in February 2004 while attending Harvard University. Facebooks success is largely due to the environment that it was launched in, being a well respected university it was held in high esteem, making more people want to signup, another factor of Facebooks success is the intuitiveness of the application as a whole. The experience a user gets from Facebook is very positive, initially when Facebook launched the ‘News Feed’ some users we’re concerned about privacy, but this has grown to be one of the key features on the site, allowing users to quickly see what their friends have been up to in there absence. Facebook launched its application interface in May 2007 which allowing developers to extend the capabilities of the site and combine data from other sites. These applications are spread throughout the site virally with users usually sending requests through applications to other users, if you accept the request the application is installed on your profile and has access to your Facebook details. For instance the iLike application allows users to play clips of music they like on their profile, show concerts they are going to and play a music trivia quiz. The application had great success after its release, making it one of the most popular applications on the Facebook Platform. As of November 2007, iLike has more than 15 million users. With the launch of Facebooks Pages, iLike now creates pages for bands. A similar feature is also available on MySpace and Bebo. Eight months after Facebook launched its developer platform, MySpace responded with its version, the MySpace api is developed upon Googles OpenSocial platform. Many sites have already implemented OpenSocial , this  means you have less to learn to build applications for multiple websites. OpenSocial is currently being developed by a broad set of members of the web community. The ultimate goal is for any social website to be able to implement the API and host 3rd party social applications. Some of the site currently using OpenSocial include, Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo, and XING.