If you want to add your own facebook, twitter and Google +1 buttons to your blog post, simply add the following code to your functions.php of your current theme:

<?php
add_filter ('the_content', 'insertMeShare');
function insertMeShare($content)
{
if(is_single())
{
global $post;
$link = urlencode($post->guid);
$content.= '<a href="http://twitter.com/share" data-count="horizontal">Tweet</a><script type="text/javascript" src="http://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script>';
$content.= '<iframe src="http://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php?app_id=181276555267890&amp;href='.$link.'&amp;send=false&amp;layout=button_count&amp;width=110&amp;show_faces=false&amp;action=like&amp;colorscheme=light&amp;font&amp;height=21" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" style="border:none; overflow:hidden; width:110px; height:21px; float: relative; " allowTransparency="true"></iframe>';
$content.= '<g:plusone></g:plusone><script type="text/javascript" src="https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js"></script>';
}
return $content;
}
?>

This code above can be modified further as a wordpress plugin so as to not modify your current theme (especially if your theme is one of those ready made themes which has an update feature). I have made mine to be a wordpress plugin and I am using this now as my current social share buttons – see the end of my post as an example of these in action. Have fun!

2 days into the problem and frantically searching for a possible solution, I found others experiencing the issue which is currently the most popular opened bug in facebook.

Since I’m using php for the sdk, I followed the advice in comment #119 by a certain Bret Stubbs, using the latest php sdk (although I use a particularly new sdk, a version before the latest) and changing this code:

// try loading session from signed_request in $_REQUEST
$signedRequest = $this->getSignedRequest();
if ($signedRequest) {
// sig is good, use the signedRequest
$session = $this->createSessionFromSignedRequest($signedRequest);
}

to this code here:

// try loading session from signed_request in $_REQUEST
$signedRequest = $this->getSignedRequest();
if ($signedRequest) {
if (!isset($signedRequest['user_id'])) {
return null;
}
// sig is good, use the signedRequest
$session = $this->createSessionFromSignedRequest($signedRequest);
}


And found out this didn’t work for me at first (looping redirects still occured). I found out that enabling the first option below fixed the looping problem:

This would fix most of the problems with the looping redirects that I encountered. There was other sections that still had the looping redirect problems and this was solved by removing all instances of the “session” parameter checks that facebook would add to the end of the url after authorization. What I’m finding odd though is that facebook even though I specifically enabled that deprecated option “Canvas Session Parameter”, facebook doesn’t already return this parameter (I would consider this already obsoleted).

Is this the end of the story for this bug? Not by a long shot. There are still errors when calling certain OLD REST APIs through the new SDK and calling the FQL API function (still not resolved yet). I have already migrated code to avoid these calls as much as possible(I use direct graph api calls in the new codebase as much as possible, and js SDK functions for certain functions that are in the new Graph API SDK but are inferior to the OLD REST APIs in customizability… and there are no more fql function calls in the codebase).

What do I think of all of these? Robert Turall, a UK based facebook developer sums it up nicely in his blog:

The problem with Facebook’s approach to their platform and to App developers is that we all have to work to a moving target, an inherently unstable platform. Such a platform is not really suitable for producing the kind of campaign-based Apps that I produce but Facebook market their platform as THE socially-aware marketing platform for campaign-based Apps.

It’s about time they started to run it like one – got some decent QA in place and thoroughly tested their releases before throwing bug-ridden code out into the World.

I agree with this completely. Facebook APIs have been moving in such a manner that it is difficult for a developer track all the changes by himself. Incomplete documentation especially with recommended new ways of doing facebook development, the defeaning silence of Facebook staff with regards to some bugs (for example I have been keeping track of a certain bug which is already almost a year open, which is important to an app which I’ve developed, until I’ve decided to do a workaround which results to a more clunky experience due to deadline constraints), all adds to tensions in the facebook developer community.

I did this on my Cherry Mobile Nova, but basically all android phones have similar settings screen.

Facebook Zero is a service by Sun Cellular offered to its subscribers to access the popular social networking site for free (by now). Let us see how to configure this currently free service for android devices.

We need to make sure that the Sun wap APN is configured on the Settings->Wireless & Networks->Mobile network Settings->Access Point Names as shown below:

If its not created yet, let us create a new APN called “Sun GPRS” (screenshot below shows the important settings used for this wap service):

Select this APN for use and on the previous screen, enable Data:

This will let android connect to the wap service. Let us now open the default android browser and type in “0.facebook.com”:

If successful, you will now connect through the browser (through wap) to facebook for FREE. Happy surfing!

What the application does is to programatically convert PHP source code into C++ and compile it with g++.

According to senior engineer Haiping Zhao, Hiphop has now been deployed to 90% of the Facebook traffic, six months after deployment.

For more information, please see the video below:

In a nutshell, this is what is happening. Google is getting posts and status updates from many networking sites and allowing them to be shown in the search results. How are they gonna do that? I got my answer within a few days.

Facebook had a change in their privacy settings. The time that you log into facebook, you will be notified of the privacy settings page and would suggest you that you change your settings to their recommended one – one that is seen by practically everyone.

Now, I am no privacy freak. Far from that. What I am concerned about is that by allowing your profile to be shown to all, a person will risk being used or taken advantage of by unscrupulous individuals in the net.

I’ve had my cellphone number been sent text messages by people I do not know about some nice deal which was clearly a scam. I’ve had a rise in spam messages when I placed my email in a post or comment in a blog.

Having said that, I strongly agree with Bruce Schneier, a well known computer security specialist, that:

For if we are observed in all matters, we are constantly under threat of correction, judgment, criticism, even plagiarism of our own uniqueness. We become children, fettered under watchful eyes, constantly fearful that — either now or in the uncertain future — patterns we leave behind will be brought back to implicate us, by whatever authority has now become focused upon our once-private and innocent acts. We lose our individuality, because everything we do is observable and recordable.

in his blog as a rebuttal to Eric Schmitt, CEO of Google, who said a dangerous statement to Maria Bartiromo during CNBC’s big Google special, that “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”

Think about it. You don’t hide things from people you don’t know because you did something bad. It is more likely that you hide things from people you are not likely to trust because they would like to do bad things to you.

What makes facebook interesting are its applications; which are mostly user created, and add life to the social networking site.

Here’s how to submit a facebook application to the net:

1. Join as a facebook developer, and on the http://www.facebook.com/developers/ url, click on the Set up new application button

2. On the Create App page, type in the name of your application

3. Take note of the API Key and Secret; you’ll need these later. Fill up the necessary items in the Basic Page.

4. Enter the canvas url (where your application will reside in apps.facebook.com), and the content url where your application is hosted.

5. Press Save, and you’re off to start a brave new world of creating a Facebook Application!

The simplest start for a facebook application looks like this:

require_once 'php/facebook.php';
require_once 'config.php';

$facebook = new Facebook($api_key, $secret);
$user_id = $facebook->require_login();

echo “Hello, $user_id!”;

facebook.php is the facebook php client which you can download in the developers site. You can learn more about the api in the http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/ site.

Have fun!