| 1 | NAME |
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| 2 | Facebook.par - Facebook support for BarnOwl |
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| 3 | |
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| 4 | DESCRIPTION |
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| 5 | The Facebook module implements Facebook support for BarnOwl. |
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| 6 | |
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| 7 | SYNOPSIS |
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| 8 | (1) Create an empty file ~/.owl/facebook (you can use the command |
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| 9 | `touch ~/.owl/facebook`), in order to enable the module. |
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| 10 | |
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| 11 | (2) Run ":reload-module Facebook" inside BarnOwl. |
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| 12 | |
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| 13 | (3) Follow the instructions in the admin message. BarnOwl will |
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| 14 | ask you to log in via an OAuth URL, and run ':facebook-auth' |
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| 15 | with the resulting URL. It will then ask you to record the |
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| 16 | resulting access token in your ~/.owl/facebook file, so you do |
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| 17 | not have to login on subsequent BarnOwl sesions. |
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| 18 | |
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| 19 | This token is valid until you change your |
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| 20 | Facebook password or you revoke permissions for Barnowl at: |
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| 21 | http://www.facebook.com/settings/?tab=applications&app_id=235537266461636 |
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| 22 | |
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| 23 | (4) Start receiving wall updates in Barnowl! |
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| 24 | You can post updates with the ":facebook" command. |
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| 25 | |
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| 26 | POLLING |
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| 27 | Facebook.par polls for normal messages once a minute. To disable |
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| 28 | polling, you can unset the 'facebook:poll' variable in BarnOwl. |
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| 29 | |
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| 30 | TODO |
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| 31 | * Polling Facebook is pretty slow (on order of a second or more), |
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| 32 | and blocks the entire BarnOwl interface. We need to confront |
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| 33 | Perl's threading demon. |
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| 34 | * We currently expose the underlying post ID for disambiguating |
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| 35 | instances. Use something more user-friendly. |
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| 36 | * No messaging support. |
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| 37 | * No auto-completion support. |
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| 38 | * No posting to an arbitrary user's wall. |
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| 39 | * See code comments for more work items! |
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| 40 | |
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| 41 | TECHNICAL NOTES |
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| 42 | This module uses 100% undeprecated Facebook Graph API, and should be |
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| 43 | an interesting case study of how to implement a desktop application in |
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| 44 | the new Facebook world order. In particular, we do not use the old |
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| 45 | infinite session keys trick described in |
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| 46 | <http://www.emcro.com/blog/2009/01/facebook-infinite-session-keys-no-more/>, |
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| 47 | instead, we use offline_access to get non-expiring tokens. |
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| 48 | |
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| 49 | If we decide to extend our permissions to include read_friendlists |
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| 50 | (for filtering) and rsvp_event (RSVP from BarnOwl), we will need |
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| 51 | to make sure the UI for upgrading is correct. |
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