| Article Index |
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| Installing Apps on Social Networks |
| How to create a SN App |
| Installing your App |
| All Pages |
There is a lot of mystery surrounding how applications make it on to the social networks, and how users install those applications. This article is meant to dispel the mystery for non-technical people. It explains a few key points on how an application is published on the major social networks Facebook, MySpace and Bebo. It also describes the process of how a user installs that application on their account.
This article is by no means an exhaustive technical discussion of these processes, as they have a great number of technical intricacies, however it does give the valuable insights necessary to understand the process.
What are applications installed on Social Networks
The easiest way to think of applications on the major social networks is a set of normal web-pages which have been iframed into a page hosted on the target social media site. Although this is not strictly true at a technical level, it is effectively true from the non-technical perspective. The page on your website can run in any technology you wish, flat HTML, PHP, .NET or JSP. It can contain any client side technology Flash, Silverlight or Java.
When the page is loaded, Facebook sends authentication codes to your server to allow you to securely request information about the user and their friends. Information either passes through your server to the page, or can be accessed directly from your page using JavaScript. This information can then be used to make your application socially aware.
