Post-and-Play directly inside Facebook feeds
We’ve started taking advantage of Facebook’s special swf tag and now your Sharendipity creations will play directly inside your Facebook feeds when you post them!
Now you can easily share custom apps that are unique to your friends and they can interact with them just like it’s a video. No more new tabs or windows to launch the app elsewhere.
Application Sharing
These are the steps I followed to share an app with my wife to share my Christmas list.
1. Copy the URL of the app
Copy the URL from your browser’s address bar for the application you’d like to share. Each application has its own asset page.
2. Use Facebook post to share the app
You can share your link directly on a friend’s page (if they are permitting it) or you can share it on your own wall. In this case, I posted it directly to my wife’s wall.
Alternatively, you can use the AddThis share options found on the asset page to post or email your application directly to Facebook.
Application Play
Once you’ve posted the application, anyone that finds it within the feed can play it directly. By default, the post will appear with the normal blue play button just like a video.
The feed will automatically grow to create room, and your friends can interact with the application, comment, and share it with their network.
What custom app would you like to share with your friends? Maybe a custom slide show?
30. December 2009 at 9:13 am :
How does it work? What is the “special swf tag” ?
30. December 2009 at 9:17 am :
@triptych – here’s the facebook developer’s wiki resource on the tag… http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/Fb:swf
30. December 2009 at 9:26 am :
I understand that, how do you get your normal HTML page to “trigger” this swf preview and player in the newsfeed? Meaning what did you put in the HTML of the page to get Facebook to “recognize” that it needed to place that image/arrow to the left of the link that plays the swf?
30. December 2009 at 9:54 am :
Hey Andrew,
Right now you have to be whitelisted by Facebook so that sharing of a page will result in the SWF being embedded in the feed. Greg’s link is actually incorrect though. Getting a SWF into the feed using the share button, or by a Facebook user sharing a link, requires use of the meta tags specifying the content type on the page: http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/Facebook_Share/Specifying_Meta_Tags.
You can also use the stream publishing methods to get SWF content into the feed, and you don’t need to be whitelisted for this (or at least didn’t when I first started using it). You just have to specify the flash media type when using this publishing method: http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/Stream.publish. Information on the flash media tag can be found here: http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/Attachment_%28Streams%29.
Hope that helps, let me know if you still have any questions.
Dale
30. December 2009 at 5:46 pm :
Thanks so much! I have so much to learn! And Facebook keeps changing things.
30. December 2009 at 7:44 pm :
Does this support unity content as well?
30. December 2009 at 9:35 pm :
Unity requires a browser plugin rather than running in Flash so I’m pretty sure this won’t work for their content.