FBML by Jesse Stay - A Review by Jeff Miller

The book I selected for the Marketing 6700 e-Commerce book review was Facebook Markup Language Fundamentals or FBML for short. I chose this book for many reasons: first for my desire to learn more about Facebook as a customizable social media platform, second because of it’s relative rank in an Amazon.com search on “Facebook development”, and finally because of it’s price (4 out of 5 stars for $20 - can’t go wrong with that).

The author, Jesse Stay, has been involved with Facebook development from the very beginning and has consulted for some of the top 100 Facebook applications. He is the CEO of a social media consulting and development business. His clients include the iTunes app iTV and the Facebook We’re Related App with 4.7 million active monthly users. According to his blog he was recently named one of 20 developers to follow on Twitter and one of 10 entrepreneurs to follow on Twitter by the top Tech blog Mashable.com.

FMBL is technical reference / how-to book about Facebook application development using the Facebook Markup Language (FMBL). The book provides a brief introduction on the history of Facebook and Facebook development. It teaches the basics of the markup language and serves as a reference. Like many other software book’s it provides several code examples many of which require the reader to have an understanding of Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) and JavaScript. Although the book is geared toward web developers it also serves as a introduction to the basics of FBML.

My first attempt to apply the principles I read from the book proved much more difficult than I expected. The getting started section described in the book didn’t match what I found on Facebook and some of the examples didn’t work. I eventually made my way to the official Facebook Developer’s Site and found the roadmap where I learned more about the changes that caused my frustration. Additionally I learned what else would impact and further invalidate what I had just read about Facebook development.

Instead of focusing on the details of a constantly changing language I will relay a few key takeaways that still hold true today and should endure the dynamic nature of the many “languages” of Facebook.

• By default, the applications canvas page is publicly searchable and viewable by those not logged into Facebook and should be tuned for Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Performing SEO on your publicly accessible pages will drive app usage up.
• Although the days of Facebook app viral launches of 1 million users in a single day have slowed down (it can take months to reach 1 million users) it still remains one of the best way to utilize social connections and gain exposure of millions of users.
• For not FBML static applications you must have your own servers. The Facebook application architecture consists of Users (who access Facebook) à Facebook Servers (send requests to your servers) àYour Servers (send data back to Facebook).
• Think big, start small, scale fast. Without the proper infrastructure in place your app could go viral and cause your servers to go down in minuets. The author recommends using a scalable service like Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). EC2 is a virtual computing environment that allows you to use web service interfaces to launch instances with a variety of operating systems and load them with your custom application environment.
• The Facebook developer’s site has helpful test consoles that can be use to validate FBML or other Facebook code.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned from my review of FBML (and subsequent attempt at Facebook development) it’s the only thing consistent about Facebook is guaranteed change. This constant change means that significant changes to the Facebook user interface or API can render a Facebook application broken. Facebook development is a constant maintenance challenge. The biggest problem with software books like FBML is the short shelf-life (the text becomes obsolete as soon as the next version is released).

In summary, I can’t recommend FBML (July 2008) for today’s Facebook development. I would however, recommend checking out Stay’s latest book Facebook Application Development For Dummies that will be released in Feb 2011. I would also recommend not spending much on a Facebook development book in general because at the current rate it will end up either a coaster or paper weight in six months.