Facebook Share Dialog Borked!

Checked your games with Facebook integration lately? Noticed how they no longer share the title and descriptions that you so beautifully crafted?

Ok, there seem to have been some changes over at Facebook to the share dialog from what I understand you can no longer specify the contentTitle / contentDescription of the post being shared when you share a link, instead it is populated with Facebook scraped data. This is quite devastating for game developers that would like to share a custom story of the player doing something cool in their game. There does appear to be a way around it however, the link that you supply to the Facebook dialog is scraped by Facebook and any open graph tags (OG tags) are read and used to describe the content in the Facebook share dialog. Now using a simple server script we can generate a page with the tags in based on data passed to the URL via GET. A simple such script would look something like this:

[sourcecode language=”php”]
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta charset=’utf-8′>
<meta property="og:type" content="article" />
<?php

$title = $_GET["t"];
$description = $_GET["d"];
$icon = $_GET["i"];
$title = htmlspecialchars($title);
$description = htmlspecialchars($description);
$icon = htmlspecialchars($icon);

echo " <meta property=’og:title’ content=’" . $title . "’ />\n";
echo " <meta property=’og:description’ content=’" . $description ."’ />\n";
echo " <meta property=’og:image’ content=’" . $icon . "’ />\n";
?>
</head>
<body>
</body>
</html>
[/sourcecode]

You would obviously need to work this into some type of landing page or the page your user will be redirected to when they click the link in the shared post will be blank!

Facebook now host Games up to 500MB!

I’m usually so busy that I miss cool stuff sometimes, anyway, I’ve discovered today that Facebook will now host WebGL (including Unity) and HTML5 game content for you for free. So gone are the days of having to host your own and get a SSL certificate etc.. There are some limitations however such as 500MB max content size, 500 max files and no use of scripting languages such as PHP. Still for most uses its great.

You would not believe how m any times I had to retype that last paragraph! My son gave me a gaming keyboard and after years using tghe same keyboard, its proving very difficult getting used to one with bigger keys!

Ok, more details about this cool new Facebook feature here