The Facebook Platform is the underlying engine that powers the Facebook API. It is what parses your FBML and enables you as a developer to write apps on top of Facebook.

F8 is the developers conference that first made the Facebook Platform popular. At this conference in 2007, Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, announced the launch of the Facebook Platform for all developers. At the time of this writing, another F8 conference is scheduled for July 2008.

Each user on Facebook has a profile that displays information about who they are, what their interests are, their birthday, location, and other information. At the time of this writing, the profile is a single page within Facebook. In July 2008 a new design will be launched, which will spread the user’s profile across multiple pages via tabs.

When I mention a Facebook Page with a capital “P,” I am referring to what is the equivalent of a Facebook profile for a business or company. Each Facebook Page provides a place for the business to put a description of itself, an image, and other miscellaneous information. Each Page also has a place for a discussion board, a Wall, images, and videos. The Facebook Page even allows apps to be installed that can be customized for businesses instead of just single users.

The Facebook app is the core of what we are building in this book. It has many different integration points for engaging the user and for informing the user’s friends about how they use your app. By the time you finish this book, you should be able to create a very basic Facebook application. I strongly suggest you research the Facebook API and see what else you can do with your app.

The canvas page is essentially any page within your application that is not a profile box. Clicking on the link of any application in Facebook will take you to its canvas page. As a developer, you are in full control of your canvas page. You can advertise on canvas pages and monetize them however you want, and you earn 100% of the revenues!

At the time of this writing, each Facebook profile allows you to install applications on your profile page, which is just a single page on Facebook. When the new tabbed profile design is rolled out in July, you will be able to add profile boxes via a simple click on a button created with the <fb:add-section-button/> tag (see that tag’s description in Chapter 3). You can use this button to specify where within your profile you’d like to add an application. You can set an app to appear on a special “Boxes” tab on your profile, or as additional information on the “Info” tab, or as a narrow box on other tabs.

Slated for release in July 2008, the new Facebook design will center around the user profile. This profile will be split into tabs to encourage more interaction between users and—most importantly for readers of this book—to provide more integration points for app developers. Facebook Pages should be unaffected by the new profile design, and almost all FBML tags covered in this book will still be applicable. I have tried to remove or note those that will be deprecated by the time this book goes to print.