best practices for my space apps
DESCRIPTION
Best Practices For My Space Apps. This power point will give you a snapshot of all the features and tools MySpace Apps Platform offers it's developers to grow their applications and engage with their users.TRANSCRIPT
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BEST PRACTICES FOR MYSPACE APPS
JULY, 2009
May X, 2009
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Overview
This document covers a number of best practices for developers building Apps for the MySpace Open Platform. It covers:
Growing Your User Base
Driving Engagement
Developer Guidelines
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Growing Your Audience
Invitations– The most effective channel for growing your user base
– Up to 20 friends can be invited at once
– Most companies create their own friend selector that passes the recipients to our Invite dialog
– We recommend that you filter the friends list to only include:● Users who do not have the App installed
● Put Top Friends and Online friends at the top of the list
● Only include regular user profiles (no bands, comedians, etc.)
– Provide an option to select multiple friends, 20 friends or all friends
– User’s can add additional names in the To: bar
– Test variations of the invite message
– Keep in mind that user’s can block receiving invites from your App
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Growing Your Audience
App Activities– App activities was recently expanded to show activities to all friends, thus creating a viral channel
– Activities must be previewed and published manually by the end user.
– Have a call-to-action to the viewers of your activities, which leads users to an OpenCanvas page that contains an add App button● An OpenCanvas page allows the developer to personalize based on the user’s ID, display name and public photos
● Use the OpenCanvas to further interest the user and have a clear call-to-action to add the App
– Parameters can be passed from the activity to the OpenCanvas that provide context to the App
Status Updates– Using our server-to-server REST APIs allow you to update the user’s status with a link to the canvas
– It must be clear to the user that they are updating their status
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Growing Your Audience
You don’t have to rely on our Add App link on a canvas.
Provide your own Add App link that points to your canvas with the parameter autoInitiateInstall=true, which will bring up the Add App dialog
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Growing Your Audience
Unlike other social networks, MySpace Apps can have a more persistent and upfront presence on the user profile with modules
With OpenSocial you can differentiate between the userviewing the profile box or a visitor/friend viewing it– Have different calls-to-action
– Personalize
Integrate personalization and animation to make yourprofile box standout and be engaging– Flash can be used on profile modules
– Make sure your profile box does not have a significantnegative impact on profile page loadtime
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Growing Your Audience
Users can post to blogs, bulletins and profiles, which are one to many channels.
Apps can also send one to one messages to the user’s inbox– Only one user can be mailed to at a time
Posting to a comment is like sending a message to the user, but it’s publicly viewable– Users can set their comments to be approved before being displayed
All these options require user confirmation and are not available as server-to-server APIs
Blogs, messages and bulletins can contain links to the canvas and Add App page, and can contain externally hosted images
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Growing Your Audience
Once your viral channels are ready, invest in sponsorship in the App gallery and other parts of the site to fully launch your App– Leverage our Hypertargeting and optimization capabilities to target the right audience with the right
call-to-action
– Use autoInitiateInstall=1 to shorten the add App process
– Use tracking parameters passed in the install callback to analyze conversion rates for various ad units
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Driving Engagement
App to user notifications can be a powerful engagement channel. They can sent to any user that has the App installed.
They can be invoked in the App via OpenSocial or from the server via REST APIs.– REST must be used for bulk messaging.
Notifications should have clear call-to-actions using action buttons. They can include a media item, such as a picture of any user that has the App installed to engage the user or a picture uploaded to an album– You can upload pictures using to be released 0.9 REST APIs for photos
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Driving Engagement
The user homepage (UHP) module is a great way to draw the user back into the App
Include in the UHP module personalized and timely updates of what’s happening in the App
Flash can be used in the UHP module to make it more interactive– Also make sure the UHP module does not negatively impact page load time
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Developer Guidelines
Using IFRAME versus OpenSocial for your surfaces– IFRAME makes it easier to keep your App update, however there is more heavy lifting in terms of
invoking OpenSocial methods for Invites and Activity Publishing and REST calls● Use IFPC library for communicating to OpenSocial from your IFRAME App
● Our SDKs cam simplify using the REST APIs
Flash can either be uploaded to our CDN or served from your CDN– We now support the appropriate crossdomain.xml permissions for non-MySpace hosted Flash Apps
Leverage install and uninstall callbacks to track acquisition and churn– The URL of the page from which the App was installed is passed as a parameter in the callback
Leverage appParams and appData to pass state from modules or canvas pages to other canvas pages
Make use of adjustHeight to dynamically adjust the IFRAME on canvas to fit your content.
In the developer website, don’t login as the App and then try to create a new App
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Getting Support
Stay up to date with best practices at http://developer.myspace.com
Follow our developer blog at http://developer.myspace.com/community/blogs/
Email [email protected]
Documentation: http://wiki.developer.myspace.com
MySpaceID SDK’s: http://lnk.ms/00rb2
Follow us on Twitter @myspacedevteam