Send notifications to people that have not installed my Facebook app

Question

MyApp users can select a Facebook friend and send them an ANONYMOUS Christmas wish. It is extremely important that the identity of the one that sends the wish is never revealed.

Everything is OK as long as the recipient is as well a MyApp user, because then I can send a notification through Notifications API. But what can I do if the recipient is NOT a MyApp user? My ideas for a workaround are:

• Ask the sender for the recipient's e-mail address, and send there the notification.
• Ask any recipient's friend that is a MyApp user to post on his wall / message the notification.

Any other ideas? Please, remember the recipient cannot know who the wish sender is.

Thanks

Dak

Anonymous messages == spam IMHO. – Oriflamme

Yes, in many cases. Here the sender (one of your FB friends) wants to send this to you, and just to you. It is as span as a post-on-wall from your friend, but in an anonymous way. – Dak

I am also searching for the same solution. please suggest some solutions. – Hydrocele

Answer 1

We've had to work around this limitation in our current implementation.

You have multiple strategies: Post on the friends wall, message, or open graph action.

We've implemented a 'recruit' action, that is posted on your wall.

Starting from here you can tie it to a custom object (which can respresent your app website).

You can tag up to 10 people per action so it's just a matter of limiting the number of invites you send at once. The big advantage of this stately is people will be alerted they are quoted somewhere, and some may need to go through profile inspection, that gives you a higher visibility :)

Underlinen

Thanks! Looks very good. Just two questions: your "recruit" action is posted on your wall (so it is not anonymous) or on your app page's wall? Do these tag notifications reach mobile devices, or only desktop? – Dak

These thing is posted as an open graph action, so on your wall. The tag notification reaches the mobile device, if the user didn't removed them :) – Underlinen

Answer 2

As you can see from the Notifications API Documentation notifications are only available to be sent to existing users of the app - it's not possible to send them to users who have not authorised your app.

There is also no way to make an 'anonymous' post on a user's timeline

Boudreaux

I know, thanks. That is why I am trying to do some kind of workaround like the two ideas on my post. – Dak

Answer 3

You can send notification to your friends by posting feed to their timeline. examples here
But unfortunately facebook is going to remove this facility in feb 2013, no need to worry you can also post it by dialog feed
These messages are not by anonymous and facebook do't allow anything without source and receiver authentication and do't reveal identity.

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