So, I've realized that a lot of the effort I used to put in commenting on interesting stuff was going into my Google Reader shared comments. I'm now pulling those out and putting them on my blog in hopes of making this sort of relevant again.

So I just got word that one of the second street businesses is looking forward to our play on Saturday. I'm a bit freaked out.

I don't do audience participation pieces. I don't do improv. I'm amazed by them. I like to watch some of them. The ones where they don't single out the most uncomfortable person in the audience and make them the butt of every joke in the show.

But I'm doing a somewhat political comedy about cats on Saturday. From 1:00 to 2:30 in the second street district. It starts outside Austin Java. Moves to the Lofty Dog at 1:30, and then to the City Hall Amphitheater at 2:00.

Yes, we reserved the City Hall.

I'm writing this in collaboration, and that provides some inoculation, but I'm also producing this thing. And I'm a bit freaked out. I know more or less what makes people enjoy themselves with scripted theater. I know the beats you have to hit. I know how much set and costume and light people expect for their money.

But we're throwing all that to the wind. All volunteer. Lots of chaos. Something like 7 total actors with actual scripted lines. Inviting the public to participate. Frightening.

There's a potential for rioting here.

I mean I hope not. But the public at large can be somewhat frightening.

I have a lot of respect for people who live outside the black box right now. I don't know how you deal with the idea that what you're about to put out there could be very, very un-entertaining.

But it'll be great, right?

Oh yeah, there's free parking in the city hall parking garage 'till five.

So I'm going to try to keep this non-technical. But I do want to explain why Facebook will be eclipsed by something else fairly soon. Their programming interface is keeping Facebook from being used for anything but MafiaWars style games.

I'm currently writing a theater ticketing and management website called BuyPlayTix. It has a lot of cool features, and so I decided to start working on Facebook integration. I tried to do a Facebook widget about a year ago (remember back when they had those?), and got frustrated and gave up. I'm glad I did since they basically removed that feature entirely.

I went ahead this time since I knew there was at least one feature that I could add that would be useful.

So now you can create an Facebook event automatically based on your event in BuyPlayTix. Which is nice. It saves you a little bit of duplicate effort. You set up your ticketing website, click a button and your event is on Facebook. Except you still have to go to their website to actually invite anyone to the event. Because their API doesn't support that feature.

I have a page for my theater company - Loaded Gun Theory. I have hundreds of fans who want to be updated about Loaded Gun Theory's new productions. They have manually clicked a button to make this happen. Yet I cannot automatically invite those fans to Loaded Gun Theory events via Facebook.

Which was ok, I guess. I still added a feature that saves about 5 minutes of typing.

Next up, our mailing lists. Email is becoming increasingly outdated, we lose about 5% of our contact list every time we send out an update. I figured it would be nice to be able to email updates to people who have opted in to our mailing list, or update them via Facebook. So I wrote a widget that would let you lookup a person on Facebook. Only downside there is you can only look them up by full name. The API has a first_name field. And a last_name field. But you can only search by full name. Which stinks if you happen to be looking up one of the many women who have their maiden and married name as their full facebook name. Or you're looking up anyone who has a nickname, but uses their full name on facebook.

Then I figured it would be nice to have an automatic import feature. Where it would take only those exact matches and update them with their corresponding facebook id. Thanks to the previous problems this wouldn't be a great solution, but it would save some time. Guess what? Can't do that. Even though I have a list of fans subscribed to my facebook page, there is no way to get them out via the API. That's right. I can't get a list of all the people who are fans of Loaded Gun Theory. Which is pretty stinking useless.

So I'm already irritated at this point. I decide to go setup the mailing list capability where it will send an email if that's configured, or a message via Facebook if you've (manually) entered the users facebook ID.

I go to look at what sort of messages you can send. Turns out:

a) You can't send a message FROM your page. I can't send a message from Loaded Gun Theory. It's always going to look like it's coming from Tim Thomas. Which is great if you know me, but we actually do have fans who don't.
b) You can't send a message that shows up in the Inbox. At all. Period.
c) You can't send a private message to a user.

What can you send? You send send a status update (again as Tim Thomas, not Loaded Gun Theory). You can send a notification (which shows up in that tiny little box in the right hand corner that you don't pay attention to). Or you can respond to a status update. Which doesn't seem to be the best way to notify a fan about a new production.

So what do I have? I'm still sending out email and I'm sending those little notifications in the bottom right. I guess it's better than nothing. But barely.

I understand they're trying to prevent spam, but they're also preventing every legitimate use. And I can still go into the application and spam people. It just takes longer for their page to load than mine.

I also added twitter support. That took 3 lines of code, and works exactly as you would expect.

Has anyone had success in communicating with Facebook users via the API? What did you do?

Etta Mae Thomas was born on March 20th, 2009 at 4:03pm. She weighs 7lbs, 7oz and is 19 inches long. She seems very peaceful and healthy.

So after a rather exciting morning we're at the hospital. Julie woke up at 4:45, but I didn't get up until she took a shower around 7am. We waited until Julie's Doctors office opened and headed over. They validated that Julie was indeed in labor. We both knew that already. So we got ourselves across the street to the hospital as fast as possible. Some stuff occurred. Lah, lah, lah. And Julie has her epidural now, and we're hanging. The Doc is currently in surgery so they're not going to get this party going for a bit. So we're just relaxing. Happy for the miracles of modern science that have Julie currently out of pain.