Using Facebook to get new players

[MAruz]

I've seen allot of web pages starting to create their own page on Facebook, and add a social plugin to facebook on their own pages (The simple like button, with images of other Facebook users who've already liked the page). I guess most of you have seen this.

I believe this kind of feature on your game page can help you to get new players, and to post updates and news about your game to existing players. What do you guys think, would you be willing to try this on your game page to get more new players coming your way?

[Rastan]

I'm actually planning to use the whole Facebook api and all and let it actually log people into my game for character creation. I do think just using the social features would also boost plays but would take a bit of advertising(most of which Facebook has built in so you can implement easily best I can tell)
Once I get it live and in some sort of solid late stage beta I'll report my success or failure.

[SpiritWebb]

It would be neat to get the Birds Eye View project I am working on, to get it implemented into Facebook. What to do with it, idk. But I have considered it as well...

[Baseball435]

im pretty sure there is a facebook like kit you can download with html codes and php codes and everything to put this kind of stuff onto your webpage. I used to have it on my first website i made. Forget the url though

[Rastan]

From researching it and playing with some of the code from facebook the hardest part seems to be A: Making sense of the facebook versions of php and JS and B: Keeping up with the changes. Facebook has just recently made a change that I think for a lot of people was pretty time consuming to implement and they gave a couple months to have it in place. I don't have a "kit" I do have the facebook code packages tho. There is a lot of documentation for it all... It's just that a lot of it is very jargonish and not so easy for someone still getting the regular coding down much less their own modification of it to understand. I am planning on buying a book about just implementing their code. Once I select one I'll review whether it was in any way helpful to me.

[Jackolantern]

From researching it and playing with some of the code from facebook the hardest part seems to be...keeping up with the changes.

Tell me about it. I hate using "piggy-back" technologies who's structure depends on the UI of a popular service. Look at UI add-on development for World of Warcraft. Every 3 - 6 months an update comes out that breaks your add-on, and every 2 years or so an expansion comes out that either deprecates, bans, or ruins it.

[vulpinoid]

I was going to start a new thread about how I could possibly link my "work in progress" to Facebook, and what the best method would be.

Based on this thread, I'm thinking the best solution for a amatuer developer is simply "DON'T DO IT!!", I don't know if I'd have the time to continually update parts of the code just to keep abreast of the changes happening within the Facebook paradigm. I'd be far more interested in keeping the game fresh and the storylines interesting to a community of dedicated players...I don't know if I could handle too many players in my little game anyway.

Perhaps the best option would be to simply create a Facebook fan groups that links across to the game, then using that to update the players about changes and new storylines.