VoIP User Presence Application for Facebook

Mashup Time!

I love mashups. I'm also rapidly becoming a fan of Facebook and their creation of an open API is both a bold move on their part and a great opportunity to have some fun with mashing up VoIP User to other communities and social networks.

Here we present a start. A VoIP User SIP Server presence application combined with Google Maps.

What it does

If you have a Facebook account, and you have a VoIP User SIP account you can plug your VoIP User SIP account into your Facebook Profile. The application will then display your online/offline presence status within your Facebook profile page.

I've taken it a little further in the main application page within Facebook allowing you to see your position as geo-targetted by our servers (this is a little hit and miss, but I reckon I can get you to within 10 miles, 90% of the time). A future adaptation is planned where the Google Maps mashup is displayed within the Facebook Profile page. At the moment that's not possible due to the way Facebook restrict use of Javascript in that section. Well, I say not possible - anything is possible of course. It's just more of a kludge than I'd like, and therefore going to be a time-consuming build.

How to install

Login to your Facebook account and then go here:

http://apps.facebook.com/voipuser/

You should get presented with a page that looks something like this:-



You need to tick the box that says "Keep me logged into VoIP User Presence". That's important as it maintains the link between our SIP server and Facebook, enabling us to push changes to your present status to your profile page, even when you're not logged in.

Click on the "Log in to VoIP User Presence" button.

That lands you on a page rather like this:-



Click the "Add VoIP User Presence" button.

You should see the following screen. This is where we associate your Facebook ID/Profile to your VoIP User SIP account.



You need to enter your VoIP User website username and VoIP User website password and click submit. There's a handy link just next to the submit button for those of you that have a tendancy to forget passwords (although you should have that somewhere in an email from us if you've never changed it).

Now you should be validated and sent to the main application screen which will look something like this (shot taken when I was out and about today):-



That's it, job done. As long as you have a SIP device logged into the VoIP User server, you'll see an "Online" icon in your Facebook profile page box. If you don't have a device logged in, it'll show you as offline.

If you want to uninstall the application, go to your Facebook profile page, in the top left menu click the "edit" link to the right of the title "Applications" and you can uninstall there. Running the uninstaller removes all the links between your VoIP User account and Facebook and we do not store any residual data.

Next Steps

Click to call, obviously. I'm working on it

I'll also be developing ways to utilise the "network" features within Facebook, in particular the way that this application can relate to your Facebook friends that also have devices logged into VoIP User.

I've also built a small API to drive this through a peering network for other SIP providers, and there's something else completely different being developed in the workshop. More on that later...

Incidentally, we also have a network group on Facebook here:-

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2 ... amp;ref=mf

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