Facebook Unveils LiveMessage Beta Feature

June 12, 2008

Facebook announced last night the availability of LiveMessage, a new beta feature available to developers. Likely the result of much work put into Facebook’s new chat feature, LiveMessage allows messages to be pushed from one user to another via AJAX.

Unlike the typical HTTP “pull” structure in which the server sends data only when the client requests it, this change will give the appearance as being a “push” structure to the end users. The new LiveMessage wiki entry explains how easy the feature can be implemented. In order to receive messages, a callback handler must be set up in the following manner.

// listen for messages sent with the "game_move" event name
var livemessage = new LiveMessage('game_move', function(data) {
    // successfully received a message - "data" is a JSON object.
});

Advertisement

Sending a message is equally easy to implement.

var livemessage = new LiveMessage('game_move');
var data = { from : from_uid, msg : message_text };
livemessage.send(recipient_uid, data);

Given that each LiveMessage is set up with an event name (”game_move” in the above example), it seems that setting up multiple message types would be easy to achieve, simply by providing a separate event name for each.

Clearly, such a unique addition to the Facebook Platform could result in a wave of new types of applications previously unthought of or simply impractical given the technology available.

Share on Facebook      Share This

Comments

6 Responses to “Facebook Unveils LiveMessage Beta Feature”

  1. Noor Mohamed on May 4th, 2009 6:50 am

    I want friends to join me,if you want to join me please send me a mail.

  2. Patricia Morgan on November 6th, 2009 4:03 pm

    I love facebook but there is no one to contact when having problems with applications. I lost my farm on farmtown a while back, started a new one and got to level 34. Now I can’t get in to ft again. I also can’t get in to my cafe. The apps are not even available to me and I am so furious. What is the problem and why isn’t there any help.

  3. Christopher on November 12th, 2009 4:52 pm

    Hi Patricia,

    Have you tried contacting the developer of Farmtown?

    http://apps.facebook.com/farmtown/settings/support/

    Hope that helps. :)

    Christopher

  4. Evan Einhorn on December 8th, 2009 1:38 pm

    It is very frustrating that there is no phone contact information for Facebook. It not easy to keep this civil so I will end here.

  5. Amanda Haithcock on December 9th, 2009 4:44 pm

    I went to privact settings and clicked on search. There is no dropdown menu to click on what I want to omit from public searches

  6. hamdib baatout on June 11th, 2010 6:46 am

    Le compte que j’ai créé pour faire la promotion de mon activité est désactivé.

Got something to say?





Close
E-mail It