Facebook for webOS: Seed Status

by kpdecker on May.18, 2010, under Dev, Palm, webOS

With the 1.2.1 release of Facebook for webOS, we are now officially supporting the ability to seed status updates via an application manager launch. This allows for applications that do not wish to interact directly with the Facebook APIs to provide Facebook status posts with minimal effort.

All that is required is a single service request to the application manager.

function seedFacebookStatus(text) {
    ServiceRequestWrapper.request('palm://com.palm.applicationManager', {
        method: 'launch',
        parameters: {
            id: "com.palm.app.facebook",
            params: { status: text }
        }
    });
}

This call will launch the Facebook application, open to the new stream, and populate the update status control in the Facebook application. Once populated the user may edit the message as they please and submit.

A sample project is available on github.

Are there any other features that you would like to see via launch APIs in the Facebook application or for Facebook APIs in general on webOS? Feel free to leave a comment on this post with any ideas that you may have.

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6 Comments for this entry

  • JC
    May 18th, 2010 on 3:54 pm

    Is there a Facebook API that’s going to be available for devs to use on WebOS?

    I am working on some Facebook integration features for NaNplayer, but do not want to depend on a separate app to submit them. I emailed you about this with more details a few days ago.

    I would primarily need to be able to submit status updates with text, images and links.

    Thanks,
    JC

  • kpdecker
    May 18th, 2010 on 4:03 pm

    @JC, I sent a response using my Palm account.

    For the near term any interactions with Facebook other than the status seed documented above will have to hit the APIs published by Facebook. I will bring the suggestion of a system-level API back to the team though!

  • Greg
    May 18th, 2010 on 4:08 pm

    This is awesome! Thanks for adding this.

    In the future, will it be possible for apps to register a common service for, say, Twitter? It would be nice to send a message saying “post this Twitter update” and not care which Twitter app/apps the user has installed – obviously this would require the devs of the different apps to agree on an interface, but this sounds similar to the JavaScript services that were mentioned at DevDays.

  • JC
    May 18th, 2010 on 11:21 am

    Thanks Kevin.

    I thought that might be the case about the older API. Facebook is definitely pushing devs towards their newer stuff.

    After a few days of experimenting, I have a solution working that uses a webview to do the necessary Oauth transactions.

    I’m using the type=user_agent as this doesn’t require that the client secret be included in the app. I also use scope=publish_stream,offline_access to allow status updates and avoid the expiration issues.

    It’s a bit kludgy, but it is what Facebook seems to recommend these days.

    Thanks for your responses and your great work on the app.

    JC

  • Geoff
    June 8th, 2010 on 2:57 pm

    I’d love to be able to open a specific user’s profile via the API. The foursquare app for now opens up the mobile website, but I’d rather it open in the facebook app if they have it installed.

  • kpdecker
    June 10th, 2010 on 1:47 pm

    @Geoff, I’ve forwarded on to our PM for discussion. Thanks!

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