today facebook revealed their new api to update user’s status, and i am quite certain that it will play a vital role in the massive “status” market that is controlled by twitter. lets see how we can update status of any users of your application using this new API called “status_set()”. first thing is to update your facebook client library from this link to make thie api available to your application. and oh, one more thing to note which is very important infact. your users must allow extended permissions for “status_update” before you can do it.

here is the code. first it asks for user’s permission to update his/her status directly from this application. if user grants the permission – we will display a form to our user. then the rest is just hitting the submitting button with new status

<?php
include_once("config.php");
if (!$facebook->api_client->users_hasAppPermission("status_update")){
echo '<fb:prompt-permission perms="status_update" next_fbjs="greet()">Let us update your status from this application</fb:prompt-permission>';
$visibility = "none";
}
else
$visibility = "block";

if(isset($_POST['status']))
{
    $facebook->api_client->users_setStatus($_POST['status']);
    echo "<p>Your status has been updated</p>";
}
?>
<div id="statusdiv" style="display:<?=$visibility;?>;">
    <form method="POST">
        Please update your status:<br/>
        <input type="text" name="status" /> <br/>
        <input type="submit" value="change status" />
    </form>
</div>

<script>
function greet()
{
    var session = "<?=$facebook->api_client->session_key;?>";
    document.getElementById("statusdiv").setStyle("display","block");
    new Dialog().showMessage("Info","Thank you for granting us this permission! Now you can update your facebook status directly from here.");
}

</script>

here is the sequence

screenshot 1: default view, before granting permission

screenshot 2: permission dialogue, asking for the authorization

screenshot 3: status update form

screenshot 4: confirmation

so this is it! pretty easy, eh?

sounds crazy right? but actually you can make a great use of this feature in your facebook application. lets think that your application is kind of a todo-list or birthday reminder. now your users will create tasks or added friend to be notified when their birthdays arrive, or when the eta of a task is in 24 hours. in these cases you may have to update those user’s profile in background so that when they visit their profile page – they will see the latest information, and that will be very useful for them.

there are two ways to accomplish this task

1. by calling setFBML offline, using any of user’s session key.
2. by using <fb:ref /> with an url handler, which is a smart way indeed.

in this article i am going to focus on first technique. next article will focus on 2nd one.

updating using profile_setFBML()
to use this api offline, you first need a session key. the following code will print the session key for you.

<?php
echo $facebook->api_client->session_key;
?>

this code will output something like “6de106fa7e2de0820b091f12-503274632” which is my session key for this application.

now you can update all of your user’s profile using the following code. please note that i have used batch api for the sake of performance.

<?php
require_once 'client/facebook.php';

$appapikey = 'ff0b3d87fc42915533e15dc238f2d447';
$appsecret = 'app_secret_key';
$sessionkey = "6de106fa7e2de0820b091f12-503274632";
$facebook = new Facebook($appapikey, $appsecret);

$uid1 = 657561905;
$uid2 = 503274632;

$facebook->api_client->user = $uid2;
$facebook->api_client->session_key = $sessionkey;

$facebook->api_client->begin_batch();

$facebook->api_client->profile_setFBML(NULL, $uid1, "Offline profile <fb:name uid='{$uid1}' useyou='false' />", NULL, 'mobile_profile', 'profile_main');
$facebook->api_client->profile_setFBML(NULL, $uid2, "Offline profile <fb:name uid='{$uid2}' useyou='false' />", NULL, 'mobile_profile', 'profile_main');

$facebook->api_client->end_batch();
?>

if you need to update thousands of your user’s profile at a time, using the batch api is a must or you will suffer from timeout. now you can execute this script by either command line “php <script_file>.php” or by accessing it via browser

pretty neat, eh?

stay tuned for next part of this article where we will tell you how to update profile data offline using <fb:ref /> with an url handler