Facebook visitor insights

Wed, 10 Oct 2012 07:25:00 +0000

The other day I noticed the still recent Facebook Software Development Kit (SDK) for PHP. You can find it here.

Simply put, an SDK allows developers to work faster by making goals easier to meet. This SDK is so straightforward that anyone can use it to build a small script to pull visitor data from Facebook.

Imagine that you want to know who visits your website and what pages they open. Later, you may want to get more data from them, location, likes, interests or anything else from Facebook. The example showed on the SDK github page is easy enough to change and achieve this. I did just that as an example, the code is at the end of this post.

If you use it, in the end you get a text file with lines that look like this:

Tue, 09 Oct 2012 06:31:00 +0100;Bruno Amaral;/how-this-blog-is-going-to-work/comment-page-1/

It starts with a timestamp, shows you the name of the person and the page that person was browsing. It could also give you the visitor’s facebook ID, facebook profile, etc.

The caveat here is that for you to get this information, that person must first authorize access of your Facebook Application.

When was the last time you authorized a Facebook App?

Before you ask: This blog will not run any of the code below or collect information from your Facebook account.

A clean slate

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 23:49:33 +0000

Some of you may remember a different blog, Relações Públicas.

Written in Portuguese, It is still the blog that ranks second for google searches on the portuguese translation of Public Relations. Positioned as the best place for dialogue on PR, it stands as the result of three years of work.

It reached 550 RSS Subscribers and an average near 5000 visits per month and I believe that in time it would continue to grow. But times change and I began to regret the language barrier for a number of reasons.

So I decided to take on a new domain name, and start over. With a new blog, a new strategy and new challenges. Aggregating the dialogue being one of those challenges. (Hopefully, as soon as I have the time, you will see a good mix of blogging and microblogging.)

At the same time, I could not simply leave the first website un-attended. With a great google rank also comes great responsibility. That means that the pulse for Relações Públicas will still beat, just at a slower pace.

As for this new place of dialogue, I will try to focus on research and insights on Public Relations that applies to the discipline and not simply to a new platform for online communication.

Stick around, it will be interesting.

Browserd

Digital Insanity Magazine by Bruno Amaral

Facebook visitor insights

A clean slate