Involver SML™ & iFrames – A World of New Possibilities

This post is based on an interview with Involver’s Director of  Engineering, Eran Cedar.

Since November, Involver customers have been building successful high-profile campaigns with SML™, our unique Social Markup Language, on behalf of some of the best-known brands in the world. Now, Facebook’s recent switch to iFrames has opened up a range of new ways for Involver to improve our own applications using SML™ and for brands to create their own rich social marketing experiences.

Each of our applications is now built on SML™, which has provided us with the opportunity to prove its capability across the full spectrum of interaction now possible in the iFrame environment. For those of you not familiar with it, SML™ is a programming language that provides a simpler way for front-end developers to create rich, immersive experiences on Facebook and across the open web. You can find out more about it here.

Big Improvements
We’ve made improvements in a number of areas, one of the most exciting of which is that we can now incorporate some of the best of breed open web technologies, including standard JavaScript libraries like jQuery, into our applications.

jQuery is a favorite among developers because it allows them to incorporate items such as photo sliders in a clean and simple way. The fact that this can now be done within applications on Facebook is huge. To get a better idea what this means, compare the photo slider we used in our Flickr application before we rebuilt it using SML™ for iFrames…

And after…

This very simple jQuery slider provides a filmstrip view that users are accustomed to seeing with Flickr, and allows them to easily select as well as scroll across the different images. This was not previously possible on a Facebook application using FBML.

We are also now able to embed Facebook’s social plug ins within our applications, including the Like Button, Comments, Recommendations, Live Stream, Activity Feed and more.

A Robust Infrastructure for Sharing
Perhaps the biggest benefit of having built our applications on top of SML™ is the freedom to create rich media experiences that thousands or even millions of users can interact with simultaneously. Our experience with major media events, from the Super Bowl to the White House Commission on Remembrance, has proven SML’s capability to handle campaigns of any scale.

We also handle the server side logic, which eliminates the need for any back end expertise. Developers who are comfortable using JavaScript, CSS and HTML can use SML™ to build their own customized application experiences. It’s easy to import RSS feeds and YouTube videos by dropping a simple SML™ tag, which works in iFrames in the same way that it did in the previous Facebook FBML and FBJS environment.

And the iFrame switch allows for far better, far more robust user experiences in the application tab, which means more engagement, and the ability to track and analyze the different ways people are engaging with your application, for example by using third party analytics. Applications, all in all, are becoming a far more desirable place for people to build their Facebook presence.