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Facebook Friends, Where Are You? (A popfly mashup)

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PopFly

I’ve been having a little fun with Popfly ever since I got an account. So here’s the first mashup I created using the platform. I have to say, for beginners, this is fun, easy and quick (it took me 5 minutes). Here’s my first mashup in 5 steps. This one is called, “Facebook friends, where are you?”

STEP ONE: LOGIN

Step One

  1. Signup for a Popfly account. If you don’t have one, email me. I have 5 invitations left.

    STEP TWO: YOUR MASHUP DRAWING BOARD

    Step Two

      1. This is your main mashup drawing board
      2. Browse through the entire list of “blocks” to help design your mashup. A “block” is simply a third-party wrapper that exposes functions you can use to create your mashup (more in Step 5)

      STEP THREE: SELECT YOUR BLOCKS

      Step Three

        1. I have 2 Facebook blocks, 1 GeoNames block and finally a Virtual Earth block
        2. Once you drag a Facebook block, you will be prompted to follow an additional step to get a key (it’s simple if you can follow steps)

        STEP FOUR a.k.a “The fun Step”: CONNECT THE DOTS

        Step Four

          1. Ok, this one requires a little attention so listen up
          2. I connect my Facebook block to my Facebook block. Then I connect it to my GeoNames block, and then finally I connect the GeoNames block to my Virtual Earth block. Wait, I also connect the first Facebook block to my Virtual Earth block.
          3. “Huh?”….ok, wait for it.

          STEP 5: What’s in the block

          Step Five

            1. The properties of each block can be accessed by clicking on the “wrench” icon for each block.
            2. Look at the screenshot above. My Virtual Earth block exposes 4 operations for me to choose from - addPushPin, setMapView, drawLine, deleteAllPushpins.
            3. I selected the addPushPin operation. But it needs certain inputs. I get these from my connections in STEP 4. So I’m getting the Latitude and Longitude from the GeoNames block and the name of the pushpin from my first Facebook block (my friends’ names).

            STEP 4 revisited: KUMBAYA

            1. The operation selected in my first Facebook block is ‘GetFriends’. Simply returns all my friends based on my Facebook key.
            2. I connect this to my second Facebook block. The operation there is GetUserInfo. The input is a userID which is supplied to it from my first block. So, it loops through all my friends (1st block) and gets me their details (2nd block). The details contain their city and state information.
            3. I connect to GeoNames. Operation = LookupOnCityState. Yep, you guessed it. I supply this from my second Facebook block.
            4. Finally, I send this to Virtual Earth and tell it to “addPushPin” based on the latitude and longitude of the city and state that it gets from my GeoNames block.
            5. Not only do I want a pushpin, I want the name of my friend as well. You should know how to do this now.

            And voila! “Facebook Friends, Where Are You?”

            Pop Voila

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            This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 31st, 2007 @ 8:41 am on the category Tech Churn, How To. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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