Sending Push Notifications to Facebook Friends
Posted on Wed, 2012-01-25 07:42
Hi, hopefully someone can help me with this.
I'm going to be working on an app that will send push notifications between users, as well as other things. I've setup some Facebook SSO bits and pieces, and that seems to work (I can log in/out and fetch a list of my Facebook friends, plus post to my own wall + photos).
What I'm looking at now is finding out how to pick one of those friends and send a message to them if they have the app, or post a "someone sent you a message, get this app to receive it" type of message to their wall if they do not.
I've been looking for some tutorials or something but nothing seems to be quite what I'm after, but surely there must be some functionality like this. I would imagine one of the main advantages of Facebook integration is being able to share the app virally, and to easily play/communicate with friends? I'm not sure how you would single out the friends mobile device to send the message to, out of all the potential users.
Also, I'm looking at possibly using PubNub to send the messages, if that's any help.
If anyone can point me in the right direction I'd be very appreciative.
Thanks
Replies
Posted on Wed, 2012-02-08 03:54
#2
Thanks for that, does anyone have any recommendations on where to go for a server that would be suitable and relatively cheap?
Edit: in fact the cost I can look at myself - but I'm a bit of a noob when it comes to server stuff so I'm not sure what I should be looking for. A tutorial for native push notifications recommended using a VPS like Linode, but I'm not sure what kind of RAM and storage I'd be looking at for an app like this (Basically: storing facebook ID with device ID, and handling push notification script).
PubNub needs the client open to get messages, I didn't think it was apples push notification.
I would think you would need to do something like this:
Have your own server (or hosted)
store your users facebook ID with their Push ID
then when need to send a message that a user is friends with you can look them up on your own server
and init a push message to their devices.