Writing a Facebook Application in 5 days is hard. Can you help the University of Bath Web Services team?

August 20th, 2008 Karine Joly 3 Comments

The University of Bath Web Services team didn’t expressively request any help, but if any higher ed web developer can provide some tips, it looks like it would be more than welcome as Phil Wilson hints in this blog post:

So, two days in, and dealing with FBML, the Facebook API and the low quality of the documentation has felt very much like playing a Grand Master at chess, only he won’t tell you the rules.

None of this is to say that we haven’t made progress of course (because we have!), but it has meant we’ve had to revise our initial plans to take account of what we’re finding possible to do within a week.

Something very interesting is going on this week for the members of this web services team as they are working on building Flat Out, a new Facebook application for the students of this university based in the UK as part of a 5-day-long team building initiative called “Get Creative” under Alison Wildish’s lead:

So last month I announced “Get Creative”. A week long project to work on as a team. A project that we would decide, scope and deliver together.

The aim being to break away from the norm, to establish new ways in which we could work together and to create something cool.

You can follow (as I have been since the beginning of this week) their progress via Twitter. That might be the best way to offer some help, links or tips as well by twittering @getcreativeweek.

3 Responses

  1. Phil Wilson says:

    Thanks for this post! We have, eventually, sorted out most of the issues we faced (mainly by ignoring the Facebook docs, sorting out some network issues at our end and gaining masses of patience dealing with Facebook outages), but obviously when there’re only five days to work in you have to learn to move on quickly when something’s not working quite right!

    With luck you, and the rest of the world, will be able to see it next week!

  2. Karine Joly says:

    Great to hear that Phil.
    We all look forward to seeing your facebook app.

  3. […] podcasts a couple of years ago. And just a few weeks ago the University Web Services team held a “Get Creative Week”. This aimed to provide team building and staff development within the team – and resulted in the […]

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