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LifeHack: Pay Facebook to serve Facebook ads to Facebook devs to fix Facebook bugs

We all know the situation: You find a bug on Facebook. You submit a bug report with the bug tracker. You’re looking forward to an answer. You’re not receiving an answer (in a satisfyingly short amount of time). So, why not hack the ecosystem and improve reaction times?

New Open Graph Tags for Publisher & Author

A quick one for the morning – as announced on the Facebook Developer Blog today, Facebook has updated & extended support for the author- & publisher Open Graph-tags. These tags allow blogs or news-websites to link an article to the Facebook profiles of both the author (=personal profile) and the publisher (=page). Usage is pretty simple:

Open Graph Sponsored Stories – Laser-Focused Ad-Targetting for Facebook Apps and Content

[tl/dr] (Mobile) App Install Ads and Sponsored Stories for Domains are the most widespread ways for advertising apps or content-heavy web sites on Facebook right now. These types of ads make it possible to promote likes, shares and app installations in an efficient manner, but is this really all? Since the introduction of Open Graph in 2012, user interactions on your own app or web site can be displayed on Facebook with much more variety than ever before – and Open Graph Sponsored Stories are a valuable tool for promoting these interactions.

How to Fix the IE9 Image Onload Bug

In case you are unaware: In JavaScript, there is a simple way to react to images being loaded, called the onload event. You frequently need this when working with <canvas>, or when you need the dimensions of an image for positioning, scaling etc.

5 Steps to Dramatically increase the Security of Your Facebook Development Setup

Beside the fact that every serious web developer should take some time to protect their app against attacks like XSS and SQL injections, many developers forget about protecting the app on Facebook and their own Facebook profile as well. In this quick tutorial I will show you 5 easy steps to increase the security of your Facebook apps and accounts significantly.

Shift in Paradigm: Facebook Now Hosting Your Open Graph Objects

Up to now it’s been mandatory for each Open Graph Object to refer to a corresponding URL/webpage containing the actual Open Graph metatags which manifest the object and its attributes. Open Graph is threading the infinite depths of the web with its’ meta tags, spanning a semantic web unprecedentedly large & detailled. Many native, mobile apps are just portals to their respective webservices (think client-apps for Twitter, Path etc.), thus being rooted in the web anyway — but not all apps are like that: some native apps happen to happen outside the world wide web, and for those this mandatory link to the web was a big problem (think Instagram before they even had a web-frontend). But now our friends at Facebook have had a change of heart — a bona fide paradgim shift to be exact — allowing Open Graph Objects to be created and hosted directly within Facebook!

Open Graph Apps for the Masses? An Overview of Recent Changes.

In January 2012 Open Graph, an interface that enables deeper integration of proprietary apps and websites with the Facebook Graph, was launched and publicly activated. Since then a lot of aspects of this software have been overhauled, some features were enhanced, some completely canceled. Despite initial scepticism — there was apprehension concerning extensive additional efforts for developing apps— changes made in the last weeks clearly showed one thing: Facebook wants to clear the roadblocks and even out the incipient learning curve to convince even more concept developers/programmers of their story-telling approach.

Hacking Google+ Part 3: Interactive Posts

This posting was inspired by gpluscamp, a Google+-focussed barcamp happening today in Essen, Germany. Since I am not able to attend personally, I thought I might at least contribute this way… :) Have fun at #gpluscamp!