Me and free web: 2011

Friday, December 16, 2011

Think before you click like on a page

Facebook feeds are always full of funny, heart touching, emotional posts from different kind of pages. The author encourages you to like the page to show your support. And at times we also click like on the page to support our cause, to show our liking for a celebrity, movie etc. Little do we wonder that we are providing our details to people who can sell it and exploit it for advertising.

Lets see how people do business by exploiting our emotions.

Step1: The first step is to create a page giving it an attractive name. Most of the time people target on humor or an emotional point. Let say we created a humor page titled “I am too lazy to type”.

Step2: Next is to post interesting comments. Google a bit about humor and you will get plenty of jokes and funny pictures. Creativity is very important for the competition has increased. You need to lure people to like you page.

Step3: With a good amount of subscribers to your page you are ready to cash it. Now all you need is a buyer for your page who can use this page to post advertisements. Go to any freelancer website and its flooded with buyers request.

Step4: Once the page is sold to a buyer he can simply edit the title and content of the page. “I am too lazy to type” has now become “XYZ company”. And you are flooded with advertisement that you did not subscribe for.

So what do we do about it?

The best thing will be to not to like pages at all. But that is not going to happen and we will like pages. This is what facebook is all about right?

So what we need to do is be a little cautious about the pages that we like. You can see the pages liked by you in your profile.

The Pages that you like show at the bottom of the Info tab, under Activities and Interests.

If you see any pages that you did not like or don’t like any more you can unlike them.

You can unlike a Page by taking the following steps:

1. Find the post in your profile (timeline) that states you like the Page or find a post from the Page in your News Feed.

2. Click the "x" located in the top right hand side of the post.

3. From the drop-down menu, click "Unlike Page."

You can also navigate to the Page by entering its name into the search bar in the upper right corner, and click the "Unlike" link located on the lower left hand side of the screen.

Facebook should look into this aspect and a page once created should not be allowed to change its title (atleast).

Sunday, November 27, 2011

Facebook as an OAuth

Continuing my last post we will now be seeing how we can use Facebook as an OAuth for our website.

The very fast step would be to register your website in facebook as an Application.

Go to the link https://developers.facebook.com/apps. It will ask you to log into facebook if you are not already logged in.
Click on create new app.And input the fields.

Once Namespace and Display Name is accepted it will take you to next screen where you can input your website information.
Input your email address in contact email field. Input your website address in Site URL mentioned below and App Domain should be a subset of your Site URL.

After this click save and go to Basic page in settings. Copy the App Id and App Secret, you will be needing these two fields to validate users.

Next step you will create the website OAuth.

In first page we will directly redirect to facebook authorization page. In production this can be done on click of a link or button.

index.php

<?php

$facebookAuthURL = 'https://www.facebook.com/dialog/oauth';

$facebookClientId = '145XXXXXXXXXX10'; // Put your App Id here.

$facebookRedirectUrl = 'http://subirkumarsao.dyndns-server.com/oauthdemo/userAuth.php'; // This will be the url which will do the second part of authentication.

$authUrl = $facebookAuthURL.'?client_id='.$facebookClientId.'&redirect_uri='.

$facebookRedirectUrl;

<html>

<head>

</head>

</html>

After user accepts to allow your site to access basic information, facebook will redirect the user to redirect_uri mentioned above and pass code as a paramter.

userAuth.php

<?php

$facebookAppAuthUrl = 'https://graph.facebook.com/oauth/access_token';

$facebookGraphUrl = 'https://graph.facebook.com';

$facebookClientId = '145XXXXXXXXXX10'; // Put your App Id here.

$facebookRedirectUrl = 'http://subirkumarsao.dyndns-server.com/oauthdemo/userAuth.php'; // Redirect url same as passed before.

$facebookAppSecret = "7f2feXXXXXXXXXXc40806fYYYYYYbf16"; // Put your App Secret here.

$code = $_GET['code'];

$url =$facebookAppAuthUrl."?client_id=".$facebookClientId

."&redirect_uri=".$facebookRedirectUrl

."&client_secret=".$facebookAppSecret

."&code=".$code;

$output = urlResponse($url);

$var = strtok($output, "&");

$ApCode = strtok($var, "=");

$ApCode = strtok("=");

// This $ApCode will be used as a token to get user info from facebook.

$url = $facebookGraphUrl.'/me';

echo '<pre>';

$resposeObj = json_decode(processUrl($url,$ApCode));

var_dump($resposeObj);

echo '<pre>';

function urlResponse($url)

{

$ch = curl_init();

curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST, 0);

curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, 0);

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);

$response = curl_exec($ch);

curl_close($ch);

return $response;

}

function processUrl($url,$apCode){

if(stripos($url,'?')>0)

$url = $url.'&access_token='.$apCode;

else

$url = $url.'?access_token='.$apCode;

return urlResponse($url);

}

If everything goes fine you will see user info in JSON format in output.

You have now successfully integrated your website to use facebook as an OAuth. You can now save the user info received in JSON format. If you need more specific information about the user you can ask specific permission by specifying scope in the request url. Ex: .....&scope=read_friendlists. For more details go through https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/api/.

Thanks for reading my post. If you have any doubts do post them. Suggestions are always welcomed.

Saturday, November 19, 2011

Why OAuth (Open Authorization) is necessary.

We visit many websites daily, of them some asks you to register to their website. And every one knows how boring it can get to fill up same details everywhere. It's a major issue for web designers. Most try to postpone registration unless required and keep it as small as possible.

Looking at the perspective of company it is very important to keep customer details. If you don't have customer details how do you push more products to them. Marketing teams needs it to plan advertisement to target consumers.

Think of a scenario. You want to buy a cell phone you go and search, you land up in a decent website. You like the product, and the vendor. You want to do some more research. That's the point where you left the website. Chances are you don't come back. To the website its a great loss. If they had your information they might have given a last try with some discount. But you never registered to the website.

OAuth comes here as a savior. You put a up a OAuth login option, user is directed to his OAuth website, he logs in , accepts to share basic information and you are done. Just a few clicks and you are saved from the lengthy registration form. You can always un-share your details when you want, something that was not possible before.

OAuth allows users to share personal data stored on one site to another without having to give user credentials.

On next post will take on how you can use Facebook as OAuth with an example code. And then do the same with Google. Do post about your suggestions.

Thursday, November 10, 2011

Social Networking and Cinema

Social Networking and Cinema

Like it or not Social Networking has grown larger then we could have ever imagined. Its taking new shapes and decisions without being controlled by any individual or organisation. Much like the the science fiction villains social networking sites has become a controller of our lives from just being a dumb website.Take the example of Indian Cinema.

Friday is the release date of Cinema in India (I don't know the reason behind it.). Its a working day most of the people. So who is going to movies on Friday. Students who can bunk a class or two, die hard fans of the stars, and rest people cannot be exactly to put into some category lets call them random people. Once they watch the movie they have their opinion about the movie. Say around 10% people totally hated the movie on the first day and around 10% of that posted on internet about how much they dislike the movie. Say around the same 10% liked the movie, but how often do we see people going to internet to praise a movie unless they are die hard fan. The problem is if a die hard fan is praising a movie people simply ignore them, thinking them to be biased.

10% disliked the movie - 1% posted on social networking sites - People spread it like fire.
10% liked the movie - 1% posted on social networking sites- People ignore it thinking its biased.

Friday night working people are on the way home, quickly checking rating of released movies. People trust Social networking sites more then rating from film critics. So there you go a movie which had a fair chance of survival (10 % liked it and 10% disliked it) is already a flop.

So what do we do about it?