How to Hack Together a Facebook Flash Widget

I don't read directions. Unfortunately, it appears to be a dominant gene trait that I have inherited from my father. So, with my limited ability to write any code (besides some basic markup) and my desire to hack together a Facebook widget - I wasn't too confident in my chances of success.

As it turns out, it's pretty damn easy now with the CodeBox Facebook application.

For my first foray into this, I started with the MyStrands Now Playing flash widget (imagine that). Here's all I did - if you're like me you'd much rather have a working example/walkthrough rather than reading the documentation:

• Configured the flash widget to my liking on the standard MyStrands tools page (http://www.mystrands.com/tools)

• Copied the code (which for me looked like):

• Pasted that code into the CodeBox FBML box in Facebook - this application only accepts valid "FBML (FaceBook Markup Language)" which is a slightly different than standard HTML. To make the standard HTML code into FBML, it just required a couple of tweaks.

• In this case, all I had to do was change the opening "embed src=" to "fb:swf swfsrc="

• Since FaceBook doesn't like you have a Flash movie that starts without a user action, they generally require most flash apps to have some sort of placeholder graphic - to make mine I simply took a screenshot of the MyStrands widget, dumped it into a graphic editor, smudged out the data (so it didn't look like a stale widget) and then added a "click to view" button on top. So it looks like this:

• I then posted this image to Flickr, copied the URL and made this the default image for the widget by simply adding the "imgsrc=(url of the posted photo)" to the code.

• So, when all was said and done, my CodeBox FBML looked like this:

• Save the final code (as above) in the CodeBox app and you are all done. You can check out the final product on my FaceBook profile. For those of you who have the mere thought of FaceBook cause you to "throw up a little in your mouth". Here is a harmless screenshot:

Enjoy and let me know if you guys make anything cool.

Uber Embeddable Player: Now Featured in Facebook

I had never heard of Uber before I read this article.

Epicenter - Wired Blogs: "The Flash-based player, included with Uber's drag-and-drop assets management system, launches with an exclusive music track by hip hop subversive Gnarls Barkley. Uber CEO Scott Sassa told Underwire, 'We think that shared media is a vital part of the community and something that Facebook hadn't pursued on its own. What we're providing is an opportunity to very quickly access tons of media, so you immediately grab any kind of media, easily store it and easily share it.'"

Just taking a quick look around Uber, it appears to be a pretty standard social network with a slight bias towards photography. Their most notable differentiator is the ajax-y pages where you can drag assets off of other peoples pages to drop into your library.

I'm guessing there is more (I only spent about 2 minutes on their site), check it out for yourself...

UPDATE: I missed the forest for the trees... the big announcement was the debut of Facebook's open platform and positioning as the "anti-MySpace". Totally open to any/all widget makers. There is good coverage of the ones announced at Mashable: http://mashable.com/2007/05/24/facebook-platform-30-apps/.

Last.fm: New Bite-Size Pieces

Man, I can't keep up. After stumbling across - and writing about - the new Rhapsody community stuff, I decided that I need to update some of my widgets in my sidebar. Remove some of the stale ones, tweak a couple others, and add a couple new things. I noticed that my Last.fm widgets were broken, so I went on over to see what was up... and wouldn't you know it, they now have a bunch of new flash widgets and some deeper MySpace integrations. Not only can you publish the widgets directly to your MySpace page (and Facebook soon) - but you can also import you MySpace music profile information to build a radio station.

In addition to flash charts and quilts, there is now also some sidebar-friendly radio and playlist players. The playlists also are relatively new and enables you to build playlists out of the full-tracks that are available throughout the service.

The game is really heating up, with the big guys getting bigger and new start-ups popping up every day. For the latter, I think it may be time for many to start looking to consolidate...

Player of the Day

The song, by Paolo Nutini, is not bad, but the real star is the snaggable flash player.

Arcade Fire - Neon Bible

Courtesy of Imeem....

Last.fm makes personal radio stations easily shareable [DJ Alchemi]

Last.fm makes personal radio stations easily shareable [DJ Alchemi]


I'm not a subscriber to Last.fm's paid/premium service, so I hadn't seen this (and can't yet implement it). But, David Jennings is showing of the beta of their new embeddable flash player. You, as the embedder (if that is a word), can set it up to default to any station you want (your personal station, recommendation station, neighbor station, tag-based station, etc.)



As the visitor to a site with this player, you can listen to the default station that the embedder set, or you can change the station yourself to virtually any "similar artist stations" by simply typing in an artist name.

Two turntables and a microphone....

OK, it was really just a blogger template and a line of code. But pretty cool to be able to have a dynamically updated list of what I'm listening to on my site.