Facebook StateTray, uploaded by Daniele Muscetta on Flickr.
This is a Screenshot of the small application I first described in my previous blog post.
It is a simple Windows Form that lets you change your status on Facebook without having to browse to the site. It does not rely on Facebook’s API (as they won’t let you change your status, at least to date) but is really uses a hack on the Facebook mobile pages. It is based on PHP code posted by Christian Flickinger, ported to C# (.Net 2.0) by me.
When you pull down the form you get to see the settings:
Those can be stored in an XML file, that gets loaded automatically every time the program starts.
Beware that password ARE displayed and stored in clear text.
The idea so far is that you run it on your PC and you just keep it resized so it does not show the “dangerous” bits.
You can keep it minimized on the tray in windows, pop it up when you need to update your status, write your new status and click “change” – it will freeze for a couple of seconds while updates your status, since it uses synchronous calls – then you can minimize it again.
UPDATED – September 1st 2007: I have been asked by Facebook to pull down the source code from the Net, as it violates their terms of service (I had not realized that). Apologies to all.
They also asked me to remove my code. Now we are on TechCrunch.
Yeah, I saw that last night. Actually Christian even got mentioned in a blog of the NYT: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/09/06/closing-the-open-facebook/
When they asked, I did remove my code immediately because I don’t want to have legal troubles for something so silly…
oh it seems that the moronic facebook fairies have travelled this way sprouting their legalistic abuse as well…..
Well, bob…. our code was a “hack”, an unsupported way to do something that could break any moment. We did it that way because there was NO other way. I actually got the idea of writing this and started to write something useing their “platform” but I soon figured out there wasn’t a way to change your status. So that’s why I went that way. After some people actually did this way and insisted… well, Facebook in the end decided to provide an API to do this, because a lot of people were asking for it: http://www.muscetta.com/2007/10/01/facebook-implemented-a-usersetstatus-api/