Animoto is a great idea. They take your photos and create a production quality video to the music of your choice. Its the end of those boring slide shows, for good.

We had the pleasure to work with the Animoto guys to launch their Facebook application, “Animoto Videos”, which leveraged all of the existing photos on Facebook. The growth was amazing.

(From a recent AllFacebook article here)

Scaling an application from a few hundred users to over a million in just a few days isnt easy, but we had a great team. Their backend rendering farm lived in Amazon’s Cloud, and the growth was so impressive, Jeff Bezos even spoke about them at Y Combinator’s Startup School just a few weeks ago. From 50 EC2 instances to over 4k in only a few days. See the video below.

It was a pleasure working with the entire team from Animoto, RightScale, and Amazon. See their blog posts about the application here, here, and here.

I’m sure I’ll cross paths with many of you at RailsConf. First round of beers is on me.

class ActionController::Routing::RouteSet
  def extract_request_environment(request)
    contents = request.body.read
    facebook_method_override = nil
    if contents =~ /fb_sig_request_method=([A-Z]+)/
      facebook_method_override = $1
    end
    request.body.string = contents
    { :method => facebook_method_override ? facebook_method_override.downcase.intern : request.method}
  end
end

UPDATE: Here’s a slightly better implementation that allows the .get? and .post? helpers as well as a few other things to work (thanks Chris Nolan for reminding us to update this blog entry):

ActionController::AbstractRequest.class_eval do
  def request_method_with_facebook_overrides
    @request_method ||= begin
      case
        when parameters[:_method]
          parameters[:_method].downcase.to_sym
        when parameters[:fb_sig_request_method]
          parameters[:fb_sig_request_method].downcase.to_sym
        else
          request_method_without_facebook_overrides
      end
    end
  end
  alias_method_chain :request_method, :facebook_overrides
end

While MySpace has allowed third party companies to embed widgets for quite some time, Facebook took it a step further and allowed full featured applications to reside “within” the Facebook experience, like the Social Shopping experience in Visual Bookshelf. Most importantly, Facebook allowed these applications almost full control over the application experience.

Beyond selling our own display advertising across the social shopping suite and our 20+ other applications, we can provide advertisers the ability to leverage Social Data to target customers directly. Social Data Demographics includes what user’s watch, read, listen to, and use. Beyond the traditional demographics of age, sex, and location, social data takes that a step further.

For example, the Harry Potter Book 7 in Visual Bookshelf has 4x the number of book reviews as the same title on Amazon. Hundreds of thousands of users have added books from the Harry Potter series to their bookshelves. That community is active on Facebook. Why wouldn’t an advertiser want to target Harry Potter readers when the next Harry Potter movie comes out?

This is the next phase of advertising in the social application space.

It’s simple: combine a positive review from your application’s review wall, your 75×75 directory icon, and the facebook install button. The sample we’ve provided is for the neat My Music application by our friends at Qloud.

On the publisher side, you should redirect clicks through a ‘reflector’ so that you can track the clicks you’re generating.

On the advertiser’s side, you should provide a link to the publisher with a spot for the publisher to fill in the current user’s UID. The target of the link should log the clicking user and then redirect the user to the application. Later on, you can reconcile the referred users with your installed userbase to ascertain a conversion rate (and thus an eCPI–effective cost per install).

PERSON_PROFILE_URL = "http://www.facebook.com/profile.php"

FACEBOOK_CONFIG = YAML.load_file("#{RAILS_ROOT}/config/facebook.yml")[RAILS_ENV] || {}

if FACEBOOK_CONFIG['mocked']

  class Facebook::FBMLController

    require 'ostruct'
    FB_SESSION = OpenStruct.new(:session_user_id => 1, :session_key => "12345", :is_valid? => true)

    def fbsession; FB_SESSION; end

    def require_facebook_install; true; end

    def redirect_to(url); super; end

    def url_for(*params); super; end

  end

  module Facebook::Acts::FbUser
    module InstanceMethods
      def friends
        (self.class.find(:all) - [ self ]).collect(&:uid)
      end
    end
  end

end

It mocks out just enough of Facebook on Rails functionality to use FBMLController and acts_as_fb_user from the beginning without Facebook backend.

This is an example for Facebook on Rails based code that might go to the application controller:

class ApplicationController < Facebook::FBMLController

protected

  before_filter :require_facebook_install

  def require_facebook_install
    if in_canvas? && !fbsession.is_valid?
      redirect_to fbsession.get_install_url(:next => url_for(post_install_params))
      false
    end
  end

  def post_install_params
    params.merge(:init => true).delete_if { |k, v| k.starts_with?('fb_sig') }
  end

end

Notice that the code sets the init parameter so it can be used to identify a post install call