donderdag, oktober 30, 2008

 

FriendsIQ on Facebook

FriendsIQ is a social quiz application you can find on Facebook here. It tests your FriendsIQ, which is the sum of what you know plus what your friends know.



How does it work?

You can't know everything yourself, and you don't need to either. Your friends are literally a mouseclick, a message or a phone call away. This game tests your friendsIQ. Your friendsIQ is the sum of what you know, and what your friends know.

You always get 5 random questions. For each you can answer it yourself, or ask one of your friends. Every correct answer will gain you one point. Every false answer will cost you a point. The questions you ask your friends will expire one week later. And that's all there is to it.

Screen by screen
On the main screen you see your own score (a FriendsIQ is expressed as x = y + z with x your total score, y what you answered, and z what your friends answered for you. You also see how much you gave and up to 10 friends of you gave to other users.

Below the logo is the main menu to get you to the about page, and the questions page. On the welcome screen you also see outstanding help requests from friends who delegated a question to you.

On the questions page, you see your 5 questions, or at least a short version of it. You have the option to solve it yourself, or ask a friend. If you ask a friend the request is valid for one week. After that you can generate a new question with the 'new question' button. You also get to see up to 5 oustanding help requests from your friends.

Every time a question is answered correctly or wrongly by either you or a friend, the background color will show, and you can generate the next question.


On the question page, you have one of 5 types of questions taken from the about2findout.com site. At the bottom you see if you are answering the question for yourself or for a friend. Every correct answer gains a point, every wrong answer subtracts a point.

I hope you all have great fun finding out your friendsIQ!

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# posted by Bert De Coutere @ 2:17 PM 0 comments links to this post
 

Making a Facebook application


I've been working on a Facebook application that uses trivia questions from this site. I intended it to be a real social application, so not just another way of doing trivia quizzes on your own just like you can do on about2findout. It's called FriendsIQ, and it tests the combined smarts of yourself and your network of friends, and above all your capability to know what to ask to who.

I found that debugging a social application takes more time than debugging a regular one, specially since you're not allowed to have a multitude of Facebook users to test with. I'm still working on some bugs.

There are two ways to create a Facebook application: in FBML (Facebook's own markup language) or via an iframe. An iframe is basically a piece of the browser window that gets its content from an independent other site. And that's what I used. So on FriendsIQ, what you see is actually pages that are on my own site about2findout.com within the Facebook canvas. Either way you first have to register your application on Facebook and apply for an application and secret key. (And that is fast and free.)

As the site is written in asp.net, I needed components to create Facebook applications on that platform. I wasted a day trying to get the Facebook Toolkit to work. It's an open source project on Codeplex, and a further evolution of Microsoft's toolkit. And it might be a great thing, but it's just too damn hard for a non-die hard programmer to get it to work, specially since Facebook itself has changed quite a lot. The samples don't work, and there is no documentation to get you started. You need to search for hours on the internet to figure out how it works. So I leave the toolkit for those who know how to read the source code and figure it all out, and switched to the much simpler Facebook.NET, also hosted as an open source on Codeplex. I got the major things working, although the new way of handling feed messages is not supported in this project (yet).

Here are some links that really saved me hours of headaches and got me started:
http://www.stevetrefethen.com/blog/VSNETStarterKitForNikhilKotharisFacebookNET.aspx
http://www.nikhilk.net/FacebookNET.aspx
http://www.marketing-ninja.com/old-stuff/why-im-switching-to-facebooknet-from-the-facebook-developers-toolit/
http://www.marketing-ninja.com/old-stuff/5-facebooknet-development-tips/

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# posted by Bert De Coutere @ 2:00 PM 0 comments links to this post