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I’m a big fan of not reinventing the wheel, especially when it comes to writing apps. But searching the Facebook Application Directory is akin to panning for gold in a diarrhea river. So many of the available apps are complete garbage, and you never really know until you waste time trying them out. Enter AppBistro.

This is just a quickie, and no code involved. A friend of mine on Twitter asked me a question tonight that I realized I should probably mention here. She was running into an error creating a new Facebook application, and couldn’t figure out how to move forward.

The ability to use the fan/no-fan tags in FBML has been around for a while, but the way it’s set up has been clunky to make look nice. If content is meant to be shown only to fans, non-fans will see an empty box where that fan-only content will appear.

In a previous post, I showed you how to embed YouTube videos in FBML using <fb:swf></fb:swf> or <fb:flv></fb:flv>. That solution is easy, but pulling in YouTube videos this way often means your video ends with a series of Google ads – not good, when you’re working on a corporate page or app, and those ads [...]

The FBML code to add a share button to an FBML is pretty straightforward, but if you want to use a custom image as the share button, it can be a little trickier to track down. Somewhere along the line, Facebook changed the CSS class that handled this button, so old CSS overrides on the [...]

This code snippet shows you how to make a sexy image carousel, including left/right arrow opacity fade and mouseover highlights, using FBJS. This code will work for Static FBML page tabs, FBML application tabs and FBML Facebook applications.

It’s often considered good usability to include default text in a form text input field, however if you don’t go the extra step to clear the form when the user clicks into the field to begin typing, you force them to first delete your default text before entering their own values.

One question I get asked a lot is whether or not it’s possible to embed an entire YouTube playlist into Facebook. If you’re developing a custom Facebook application, the easiest way to do this is to grab the playlist’s RSS feed and parse that out, embedding each RSS item as a video.

In short – you can’t. Or at least not if you want to be PCI compliant. In order to pass a user’s personal information through a secure encrypted channel, you will need to collect that data on an IFRAME application page. No two ways about it. Here’s why:

To embed a hosted Flash file or YouTube video to an FBML application or Static FBML tab, you must use the FBML code. Regular HTML embed code will not work. Fortunately, the FBML code is actually simpler and less confusing than standard embed code.