Greetings Developers,

The Bebo Apps Team is excited to announce something really big!  These past few months we’ve been working hard to give you access to some concepts around games that no other general social network out there has done. We know that users are already hooked on some of the great games on Bebo and we want to make sure that we give you, the developer, game-specific tools to further engage these users.

Bebo is therefore proud to announce the launch of its developer Games Tools, a collection of game-specific APIs and SN tags, useful for apps both big and small. Features include the ability to:

• Send user-initiated challenge requests to online users via Bebo IM
• Set/get scores & ranks from Bebo’s global leaderboard, visible on the games homepage
• Get scores/ranks of similar users to help in challenge pairing
• Send user-initiated smack talk 
• Show a user’s online presence in the Multi-friend selector & Multi-challenge selector
• See updated libraries for Java and PHP

Because we want to make sure that the tools we’re providing to developers are used properly within our game apps, applications will be reviewed by Bebo once a developer places them into the “Game Category” and the app is set to either public beta or live.

Once your game is approved, you will receive special permissions in the following “Games Only” areas of Bebo:

• Visibility in the Games module on the User Profile Page (coming soon)
• Access to post to the Games feed on the Games Homepage
• Access to post to the global leaderboard on the Games Homepage
• Ability to send real-time challenges to users via Bebo Messenger

A small number of you have already integrated with our new Games Tools - check out MindJolt and Playfish’s Pet Society on the Games Homepage.

To read more about the specific API calls and SN tags or to see additional examples, please refer to our Social Games section on the developer site.  Additionally, API and SNML docs are available here: http://www.bebo.com/docs/ And remember: you can always use the Bebo Developer Forums to discuss the Games Tools with other developers or feel free to reach out to us at developers-help[at]beboinc.com.

We look forward to seeing many more games on Bebo integrate with our new functionality. Happy developing!

Sincerely,

Bebo Apps Team

Great news developers!  Now your profile pages are even more customizable for your applications.  Bebo has added the ability to choose the profile layout that fits your app best.  Now you can choose to push the “About this App module” to the top of the profile page, or allow for a customizable area at the top to visually show users just what your app is all about!  You can easily change your application’s profile layout by clicking on the “Change profile layout” on the left hand bar of your application’s profile page when you are logged in as the developer of your application.

 Example of Default App Profile layout:

 Example of “About Me only” Profile layout:

Greetings Developers,

 The applications platform on Bebo is currently experiencing DB related issues.  While we issue a fix for this, we have turned apps off temporarily.  We will let you know as soon as a fix has been pushed for this issue, but we expect the fix to take a few hours. 

 We will keep you updated.

 Thank you and sorry for any inconvenience.

Apps Team

 Update: This outage has been fixed — total downtime was approximately 2 hours.

Greetings Developers, 

The documentation for the admin.setAppProperties API method reads:

The admin.setAppProperties API method is currently in beta and its features, attributes and behavior could change with no notice.

Yesterday, we changed the behavior of this API call to require a valid session_key.

We will update the documentation soon to reflect this change. We will try to give earlier notice if something similar requires a change, but we still reserve the right to make unanounced changes on API methods marked as beta (for non-beta methods we will always give ample notice before making any changes).

Greetings Developers,

We are aware that there is a bug with creating new applications on the platform and we will be releasing a fix for this issue late this afternoon.   We’re sorry for any inconvenience this might have caused.  If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us at developer-help@beboinc.com.

Thanks!

Greetings Bebo Developers!

I’m excited to tell you about  a new feature we’ve been beta testing: extended permissions. Extended permissions are a way for users to grant additional permissions to your application. Right now we’re only supporting one extended permission, “status_update”, allowing your app to update a user’s saying.

There are many details on how to do this in our documentation, but I’ll give you a quick run down here:

The first thing you’ll need to do is get the user’s permission to modify their sayings. This can be done in 5 ways:

1. The user can do it manually on their manage apps page
2. Using the sn:prompt-permission tag
3. Using the “promptpermission” attribute on a form tag
4. Pointing the user to a special authorize.php page
5. Calling the Bebo.showPermissionDialog(permission, callback) method in SNJS.

Once you have a user’s permission to change their saying, you can use our users.setStatus API method to change it. We’ve also introduced a users.hasAppPermission API method to check if the user has given you any extended permissions. Both of these methods are available in the latest versions of our PHP and Java libraries (released today!).

When a saying has been posted by your app, we’ll post a link to the app after the saying so that the user knows who’s talking for them. Hopefully other users will see what great sayings you’re posting and click through to install your app. Of course, at the same time, if you do something a user doesn’t like, they might be quick to uninstall your app.

 If you come across any bugs while using this functionality, please report them to us via Bugzilla at: http://developer.bebo.com/bugzilla/ and we will address them as quickly as possible.

Happy Coding!

Hello App Developers

Recently we enabled the use of apps on non-member pages like groups and bands. I wanted to offer a little guidance on how to make your canvas page work with non-member profiles. If your app makes use of the “require_add()” method from our php library when rendering your canvas page, you’ll need to make some adjustments for non-members visiting the canvas page.

Whenever your canvas page is being visited on behalf of a non-member page, a “sn_page_id=321″ parameter will appear in the query parameters where 321 is the ID for the non-member page. Other relevant parameters will be passed in the POST data:

• is_admin : indicates if the user visiting the canvas page is an administrator for the non-member page
• is_fan : indicates if the user is a member or fan of the non-member page. For example being a fan of a band or a member of a group.
• page_added : indicates that the page_id that was passed in is for a page that has actually added your app.

In this post, I’m going to cover the example of an administrator for a group page visiting the canvas page of your app. Lets say that you have a favorite color app. Users visit your canvas page and pick their favorite color. You then need to store that color along with their user ID. If you’re only expecting member users (not bands, groups, etc), then you’ll probably have something like this if you’re using the php library:

$user_id = require_add();
save($user_id, $color);


This works fine for regular users, but as soon as someone wants to set a band’s favorite color, they’re going to end up setting their own favorite color. So instead we do something like this:


$non_member_visit = isset($bebo->params['page_added']) &&
isset($bebo->params['page_id']) &&
isset($bebo->params['is_admin']);


if ($non_member_visit) {
$user_id = $bebo->params['page_id'];
} else {
$user_id = require_add();
}
save($user_id, $color);


Here we check if the band’s page has added your app, that you have the member_id for that band, and if the person visiting the canvas page on behalf of the band is an administrator for the band. If any of the parameters are missing, then we treat the visit like a regular member visiting.

Hi Developers,

We have updated the Java and PHP libraries for the Bebo Platform from v 0.8 to v 0.8.1 in order to handle a next parameter fix.

Though this update may not affect you, please make sure that you are using the most recent version of the library to ensure that your code functions properly.

You can find the most recent libraries here:
Java: http://developer.bebo.com/downloads/example-libs-java.php
PHP: http://developer.bebo.com/downloads/example-libs-php.php

And you can always find these libraries here: http://developer.bebo.com/

Great news developers!  Applications can now be added to profiles for bands, groups, channels, or authors!

To enable this functionality for each of your apps, please follow the quick instructions below:

1. Go to the developer app: http://apps.bebo.com/developerapp
2. Click “Edit App Settings” for your app(s)
3. Make sure that “Who can add your application?” is set to “All Profiles (users, bands, books, groups, etc)” and you’re all set!

Enjoy more exposure across Bebo when you allow all profiles to add your app.  As always, please feel free to send any questions to developers-help@beboinc.com

We have pushed a fix for the next parameter when using a Post Add URL so that we are no longer including “next=” in the URL.

So for example, when you set the next parameter for your application as Next: ?param=abc here are the before and after behaviors:

Before the fix on Bebo, the post add URL rendered like this:
http://www.test.com/callback.php?next=?param=abc

After the fix, it now renders like this:
http://www.test.com/callback.php?param=abc

This should not affect the majority of developers on the platform, but please be aware of this change when using the next parameter for tracking installs, etc.

Thanks.