XtremelySocial.com » My Greetings

My Greetings: Application Killed Off by Facebook

Tim Nicholson — Mon, 21 May 2012 14:47:03 +0000

Facebook recently killed off all of the API’s and methods that My Greetings was originally written with. This means the application no longer works and the amount of time to rewrite it would be exorbitant. We’re sad to see it go as well!

My Greetings was the first Facebook application that I wrote and the reason that I wrote it was because all of the other greetings-style apps simply generated SPAM with “requests” send to your friends and the apps were jam packed with advertising. They also required to you slowly “unlock” greetings by sending more and more of them.

At the time, Facebook’s app platform was based on what they called FBML (Facebook Markup Language). They had all sorts of Facebook-specific commands that let you fairly easily put together an app. They weren’t supposed to official kill off FBML apps until June 1, 2012, but they have already abandoned so many of the FBML commands that apps written using them no longer work.

Facebook is now pushing javascript-based “iframe” applications and the new “open graph” API’s. I have rewritten all of our other applications using these methods, but it has taken a massive amount of time. I can see why they are going in this direction because javascript is a much more widely adopted language for web-based apps. However, there are many things that used to be very simple in FBML that now require a ton of programming or aren’t even possible at all.

I still like the idea of a simple greetings application for Facebook and may consider adding greetings to one of my other apps, such as My Status or the newer XtremelySocial app. Those apps both let you update your status and post on your friend’s walls, but they are text-based only for now.

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Our Facebook Apps Now Support SSL Secure Browsing

Tim Nicholson — Sat, 30 Jul 2011 19:35:35 +0000

Ever since Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook profile was hacked, Facebook has been pushing users toward using secure browsing via SSL. While only a small number of users have made the switch so far, Facebook will be requiring it in the next couple of months.

Now that we have rolled out banner ads on our My Info and Welcome Tab applications (to page admins only, not to viewers of the pages), we have a few cents a day coming in to help us pay the annual fee for an SSL certificate. So we are now supporting SSL throughout all of our Facebook applications. This means My Greetings, My Places, and My Status also have full SSL support.

This means you can turn on Facebook’s secure browsing preference and seamlessly use our Facebook apps without having to switch out of secure mode. While none of our apps send any sensitive data, it was annoying to our users to have to switch back and forth between secure and unsecured modes.

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My Greetings: Now Send to Multiple Friends

Tim Nicholson — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 01:29:21 +0000

We have updated My Greetings to support sending an icon-based greeting to multiple Facebook friends at the same time. Its a great way to hit up a bunch of friends at once about your favorite sports team kicking butt or wishing happy holidays to your friends and family.

Our long-time users will remember that we used to support this feature, but Facebook limited you to three (3) friends at a time. We dropped support for this when Facebook completely changed how third-party applications can publish to a user’s stream. In fact, Facebook doesn’t support sending anything to more than one friend at a time anymore, but we found a way to loop through the friends you pick and fire off individual greetings to each of them.

We hope you enjoy this new feature. Just be responsible in what you send to large numbers of friends. We may have to put a limit on the number if things get out of hand, but for now its wide open. As always, if you run into any problems, please email me.

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My Greetings: Application Dashboard Support Rollout

Tim Nicholson — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 17:33:56 +0000

I have now started to update My Greetings with support for the brand new Facebook “Application Dashboard” that was released in part this month. The main difference you’ll notice at this point is that when someone sends you a greeting, you’ll see a counter show up on your Facebook home page next to the My Greetings application.

I’ve also updated the links in your My Greetings history and friend birthday lists to link directly to that person’s profile publisher with My Greetings already loaded. This makes it much easier to quickly send a greeting to a friend, especially considering that still can’t send greetings directly from the My Greetings home page. I’ll be working on getting that fixed after updating the application to more fully support the Applications Dashboard.

The Applications Dashboard is supposed to allow for three kinds of “news and activity” related postings. I have implemented the code for two of them, but their are serious bugs in the Facebook developer API’s that are effecting all applications such that these news/activity items do not actually show up in the dashboard. Facebook is aware of these issues and is supposedly working on a fix.

Since I’ve already put the code in place, as soon as Facebook fixes the issue with them not displaying, you should immediately start to see the following:

1. You should see a message under the My Greetings icon in the dashboard informing you that you have received a greeting from a friend.

2. When viewing the applications that your friends are using in the dashboard, you should see a message about what greetings they have sent or received.

The third type of news item in the Dashboard are global application messages. I have not yet implemented that, but plan to do so at some point. For now I’m still displaying application announcements on the My Greetings home page and you should also still be receiving them in your Facebook news stream under “Updates”, if you have become a fan of My Greetings.

Please check out the related articles below for more information about the new Facebook home page and apps and games dashboards.

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Facebook Roadmap: Removing All Profile Boxes in Early January

Tim Nicholson — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 18:29:06 +0000

Back in October, Facebook published a “roadmap” of changes that would be taking place then through the beginning of 2010. We have posted articles on this here, but wanted to dig deeper into an area that is going to have a significant impact on users and developers and a huge impact on our My Info custom profile box application.

The net of the announcement is that users will no longer be able to have any custom profile boxes on their Wall or Info tab by early January. The only current functionality that will be supported is the currently available full-page custom tabs. However, these custom application tabs will shrink from 760 pixels wide to 520 pixels wide.

I do like the fact that Facebook is now sharing their roadmap ahead of time. Previously, they would simply make massive changes to the site without any real warning. Users would get miffed and complain like crazy. So this is a step in the right direction. However, they still aren’t really explaining very well the reasoning for the changes.

Without getting too “preachy”, I think removing custom profile boxes from user’s Facebook Profiles is silly. They’ve always placed very strict limitations on the number of them, where they appeared, and what could go in them. All those rules were annoying to users and developers, but at least they kept Facebook from looking like a “pimped out” MySpace profile. However, I see no legitimate reason to remove user’s ability to place small boxes of information on their Wall and Info tabs.

Facebook offers up “custom tabs” as an alternative, but we’ve always had custom tabs. My Info fully supports them and they are nice when you want to display a TON of information, but they don’t replace the need to show small bits of information to users on your main profile. This is going to hide most custom information from users unless they take the time to click through each of your custom tabs on your profile.

Also, let’s not forget that the custom profile tabs are getting smaller by about 200 pixels in width. For most people, this won’t be a huge issue, but if you have very large images or a site laid out with multiple columns of specific widths, you will need to adjust your layout.

One direction that I am considering personally, is providing the capability to have a single custom tab that displays information from all of my XtremelySocial Facebook applications. This would allow custom text from My Info combined with your recent Facebook status updates from My Status and even recent gifts given and received from My Greetings. Does this sound like a good idea? Please share your comments and ideas on this.

Here is an exact excerpt from Facebook’s developer site regarding profiles:

Description

Going forward (in the short term) application tabs will be the only way applications can integrate into profiles and Facebook Pages. We will remove profile boxes, application info sections, and the Boxes tab. We are exploring additional ways to enable developers to integrate into profiles and Pages.

Estimated Timing
Early 2010

Details
Application tabs will be the only way to integrate applications into profiles and Pages. Application tabs will shrink from 760 pixels wide (today) to 520* pixels wide to accommodate a slightly revised design. Boxes, info sections, and the Boxes tab will be removed in the near future.

In the longer term we are evaluating a number of new and interesting ways for you to help users express connections to your applications as a part of their identity. You can expect to see some of this thought emerge in future iterations of the profile.

*Note: We previously stated that profile tabs would be shrinking to 510 pixels. Our latest designs indicate they will instead be 520 pixels. We’ll keep this page updated with the latest information.

FAQs

Where will users’ profile boxes go?
Profile boxes will not exist in the near future. Application tabs will be the only way developers can integrate into the profile. If integrations on the profile are an important part of your application, we encourage you to focus development and transition to application tabs.

Will you offer an “Add Profile Tab” button, like some of the other buttons you’ve released?
Yes, we’re hoping to create something like this — most likely in early 2010.

Here is a link to the original article.

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My Greetings: Changing the Name of WallPoke

Tim Nicholson — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 22:49:54 +0000

Facebook has been giving us a hard time about the name “WallPoke” as they apparantly don’t allow applications to have either the word “Wall” or “Poke” in them. At this point, I’m leaning toward renaming the application “MyGreetings” as that is a bit more representative of what the application does as well as a bit more generic to accomodate where the application has grown. I’m definitely seeking your suggestions on names for the application. I’ve been contemplating names with Gift or Gifting or Icon or Greeting, etc. in it, but please feel free to get creative! Thanks!

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My Greetings: Enhancements: Icons sorted by popularity, Wall-to-Wall links, Friend Birthdays list

Tim Nicholson — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 04:41:26 +0000

General Icons now ordered by Popularity
Now that we have some history built up, we re-arranged the WallPoke icons in order of popularity. So don’t worry if you see things in a different order. We haven’t removed any icons, they may just be on page 1, 2, or 3 depending on how often they have been used in the past. We will try to keep icons for upcoming holidays throughout the year on the first page, though.

Wall-to-Wall with a friend link
We’ve now added a new link to the WallPoke history pages to be able to see “Wall-to-Wall” with any of your friends. This is a very nice way to see all recent communication with a particular friend as it not WallPoke specific. It shows all communication back and forth on your walls with that person from WallPoke, regular Wall posts, comments, and other applications.

Recent and Upcoming Friend Birthdays
We’ve also rolled out what I would call a “beta test” of showing friend’s birthdays. We figured this would be a very handy feature. It will show birthdays within the past 2 days and upcoming birthdays within the next week. If there is interest, we’ll look into adding some major holidays into the list as well. As always, we will continue to make enhancements to WallPoke. With all the changes Facebook has been making these days and the mass hysteria over them, we’d love to hear your feedback on these new enhancements and any thing else you’d like to share.

Thanks! Tim

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My Greetings: New Easter Bunny & Eggs

Tim Nicholson — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 16:24:25 +0000

Just in time for Easter today, we added a Happy Easter bunny and 4 colored eggs. Don’t forget to WallPoke your friends or post Happy Easter on your profile.

Here are the new Easter icons:

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My Greetings: New Cute Critter Category for WallPoke

Tim Nicholson — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 16:36:24 +0000

I’ve now added a whole new category for what I’m calling “Cute Critters”. Its a collection of cute monsters and animals from PixelGirl Presents . Go here to start sending Cute Criters.

We’ve also added a boy, girl, cat, and dog to the General category.

Here are just a few samples of the new Cute Critters and General icons:

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My Greetings: Don’t forget to cheer on your favorite Final 4 basketball team!

Tim Nicholson — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 18:56:40 +0000

You can use our WallPoke NCAA category to send your favorite team to your friends or simply post your favorite team to your own profile. Michigan State plays Connecticut tonight at 6:07p ET and North Carolina plays Villanova tonight at 8:47p ET. The championship game is on Monday 4/6.

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My Greetings: Now View Your Friend’s Recent WallPoke Activity

Tim Nicholson — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 21:03:47 +0000

We’ve always had the ability for you to view your WallPokes sent and received, but now we’ve added another page to the application where you can see recent WallPoke activity by your friends. The history displays just like on a Wall and you can see and post comments directly. We also display a brief list of all your friends that use WallPoke on the top of the page. Check it your WallPoke Friend History here. Please note that this feed is controlled by Facebook and they will only display very recent WallPokes, like within the last couple of days. Unfortunately, we can’t extend the timeline further back unless Facebook gives us more control over the feed.

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My Greetings: Send Beer or Drinks to Your Friends + Faster Page Loads Throughout

Tim Nicholson — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 22:00:16 +0000

We have now added 39 different brands of beer and liquor to a new Drinks category in WallPoke. Now you can post that are you are drinking or favorite beer or send a Red Bull & Vodka to a friend. We plan to add even more over time. Let us know here if you have some in particular you would like to see.

Here are some examples of the new drinks added:

Also, we have optimized the thumbnail images you see when you select a WallPoke or viewing your history. The icons are more crisp, but also should load faster than before.

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My Greetings: Go WallPoke Yourself!

Tim Nicholson — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 04:48:01 +0000

I’ve just rolled out the latest addition to WallPoke. Now you can WallPoke YOURSELF! Why would you want to do that you ask? Because you can now post your mood, holiday greetings, or cheer for your favorite sports team on your own wall. This will announce it to anyone that views your profile and and it will also appear in all of your friend’s news feeds (home page) as well. So you can post moods or wish everyone a Happy St. Patrick’s Day or say Go Buckeyes! Happy WallPoking! There are two ways to post a WallPoke to your own profile. There is a new link on the main WallPoke page to “WallPoke Yourself”. You can also simply view your own profile and click on “WallPoke” in the publisher next to Write Note, Add Photos, etc. If you don’t see that on your profile, click the little down arrow to shore more applications and choose WallPoke. You can thank Leah for suggesting this by responding to our poll and suggesting this feature in the comments. Vote now in the WallPoke poll to help guide development of the app! Thanks for your feedback Leah!

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My Greetings: Several New WallPokes & New WallPoke User Rank Levels

Tim Nicholson — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 00:23:20 +0000

We’ve now added over a dozen new WallPoke icons that you can send to your friends over the last couple of weeks. You may have seen them already. We’ve also set up an initial user ranking system. You may have noticed that WallPoke has told you that you are a WallPokin’ n00b, or a WallPokin’ Pro.

Here are the new WallPokes available:

Here are the user ranking levels as they stand today. They are based on the total WallPokes sent AND received:

Wallpokin’ n00b – Less than 5
Wallpokin’ Novice – 5 or More
Wallpokin’ Fool – 10 or More
Wallpokin’ Apprentice – 25 or More
Wallpokin’ Pro – 50 or More
Wallpokin’ Expert – 100 or More
Wallpokin’ Maniac – 150 or More
Wallpokin’ Insomniac – 200 or More

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MyGreetings: Send Barack Obama or George Bush to your friends

Tim Nicholson — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 15:14:24 +0000

Due to the inauguration of Barack Obama today, we decided to let you send him or George Bush to your friends with WallPoke. Check out the pics and send them today.

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Welcome to XtremelySocial!

Tim Nicholson — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 22:42:00 +0000

One of the great features with this site is that you can log in with your Facebook user ID and password. No need to register with yet another website! You can also post your comments on this site to your Facebook news stream, if you would like. You can see a list of your Facebook friends and their current status. You can easily invite your friends to check out our website as well. New! Now see your whole Facebook friend activity (news) stream!

We plan to add even more Facebook functionality and also add similar features for Twitter, MySpace, and other social networking sites.

XtremelySocial.com is owned by Tim Nicholson and builds socially-connected applications and websites to keep you connected to the people that matter most in your life. This site encompasses all of our internet projects, such as our various Facebook applications and websites.

Our Facebook Applications

My Greetings (formerly WallPoke) allows you to do things to your friends, such as send them a drink, tell them you love them, or cheer on your favorite sports team with various icons. You can also post your mood or your favorite team to your own profile. Currently there are over 400 different greetings icons/actions that you can send to your friends, including smilies, love, holiday greetings, birthday, drinks, cute critters, all major NBA, NFL, MLB, NHL, and NCAA team logos, and many more!

My Info (formerly My Profile Box) lets you place any HTML on your Wall or Boxes tab. It even lets you place it on its own dedicated tab. It fully supports the new Facebook profile layout. Cut and paste code snippets from various websites to spruce up your Facebook profile!

My Status shows you all your past Facebook and Twitter status updates and easily lets you update your status on both Facebook and Twitter. It also shows your Twitter friend updates, the public timeline, etc. It fully supports the new Facebook profile layout for placing a box with your recent status updates on your Wall.

Our Websites

PalmZone.net is a site dedicated to publishing useful news and information about Palm-Powered handhelds from all device manufacturers. It is a community-based site where users and casual readers alike are encouraged to participate in discussions and surveys, comment and rate articles, and submit news, software, Palm links, etc.

PdaMobileWeb.com is a comprehensive site index of PDA-friendly websites, covering email, entertainment, finance, news, PDA’s, portals, reference, shopping, sports, tech, travel, and more. It is easy to use and optimized for mobile devices with limited screen space and limited bandwidth connections. The site is designed specifically for Palm PDA’s, Pocket PC’s, and cell phones.

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My Greetings: Vote for New Features!

Tim Nicholson — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 15:01:58 +0000

Please vote in our poll on which new features you would like to see added to My Greetings. We could really use some feedback on the application and where you would like to see improvements made. This will help us get a feel for that. Thanks!

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My Greetings: Now All Large Icons

Tim Nicholson — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 22:23:59 +0000

We have now replaced the really small original WallPoke icons (16×16) with much larger, more interesting icons (64×64) and added many new things. The icons now display across two pages, so be sure to check out the ones on the second page too!

Now WallPoke has been improved to work more like a gifting application, with the large colorful icons, in addition to being able to send a quick note to your friend’s wall. Feel free to let me know what you think!

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My Greetings: All Major Sports Logos & Profile Tab Added

Tim Nicholson — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 14:41:20 +0000

We have now added all major sports team logos that you can send to your friends. We’ve added all NFL, NHL, NBA, and MLB teams. These team logos are also much larger than the original WallPoke icons so they are easier to see and look nicer when posted to your friends’ walls.

UPDATE 12/9/08: Added all major NCAA college team logos.

In addition, we’ve added the ability to set up a full-page wall tab just for WallPoke. It displays your last 20 WallPokes sent and received to all your friends.

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My Greetings: Receive Email Notifications of your WallPokes

Tim Nicholson — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 21:49:30 +0000

I have now added the ability for WallPoke to notify you via email whenever you receive a WallPoke. You will have to opt-in one time in order to receive them. You can opt out at any time.

Go to the main WallPoke screen. There should now be an “Enable Email Notification” link in the upper right hand corner. Click on it and agree to allow it.

From then on, if someone WallPokes you, you should receive an email with the details. If you have a phone that retrieves email, you will be able to see the details of your WallPokes right on your phone!

Let me know if you have any problems with it!

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My Greetings: Initial Beta Launch

Tim Nicholson — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 03:46:44 +0000

We have now launched WallPoke in “beta” status. Actually, anyone on FB can add the application and begin using it, but we have not yet placed it in the public listings and have only invited personal friends and family so far. Feel free to use the application and WallPoke your friends. They can view your WallPokes *without* installing the application, but they may be compelled to add it themselves and WallPoke others.

Thanks to all of our friends and family for beta testing the application. Be sure to let us know if you encounter any issues and let us know what your suggestions are for enhancements to the application.

Next on our list is getting more icons for different WallPokes. We refuse to steal other people’s icons, so we are only using public domain icons or those for which we have specific permission for the artist to use. So if anyone runs across any, let me know. I’d like more icons like slap, kick, punch. I’d love to cover major sports teams and colleges too, but licensing those has got to be expensive.

Almost as important as new icons, I have begin working on a mobile version of WallPoke, but I am finding that with the “new Facebook” there are enough issues keeping the FB developer busy that they haven’t had time to get around finishing the mobile API’s that we developers need to write mobile versions of our software.

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