Alpha User Points, Mijo Shop and Open Graph Questions.

Jeff,
Good to hear from you again. Hopefully I can help answer your questions for you.

1) Alpha User Points - I initially bought your product partially for AlphaUserPoints, then my subscription ended right after it was released and right before (AUP was deprecated). I was curious, I never got the rules, were they included in the software and if so, did they ever work?

JFBConnect has had AUP integration for quite some time. Initially (I think about 3 years ago), we added the first integration that allowed rewarding points when a user left a Facebook comment, used the Facebook Like button, or invited their Facebook friends.

Late last year, we added further integration for rewarding points on new Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn shares as well as a complete Social Profile plugin for AUP which allows creating the user's AUP profile using profile data from their social network account.

Also, as far as we know, AUP isn't deprecated. They released a 2.0 back in February of this year and I believe it's still going strong. We have many users choosing AUP as their reward and profile extension nowadays.

2) Alpha User Points - I seen in another post that someone was asking if JFBConnect has implemented the rule where a member can earn points for inviting people (from FB or whatever), and they then can earn even more points if the person joins (or even a percentage of the points their friends earn). This is exactly what I need too as it creates an incentive for people to followup with their friends. Was that something ever implemented?

No, unfortunately, we can't do that. The way Facebook works, there isn't a notification when a user visits your site using an invite as to 'who' that user is. Facebook can't pass along any identifiable information about that user because the user hasn't chosen to share any information about themselves with your site. It's a privacy limitation from Facebook itself that we can't get around. I hope that helps explain why this hasn't been done.

3) Has there been any other changes in regards to AUP integration?

See #1 above.

4) MijoShop now provides a payment gateway for AlphaUserPoints. So a member can earn points and then they can be redeemed for merchandise. My site is a Jomsocial site which I rely on JFBConnect as a single login. Last time I looked Mijoshop was not something you guys have fully implemented with, is that still the case? If so, do you guys have any plans to ever? What shopping carts do you guys implement with?

We used to get quite a few requests for MijoShop integration. Ever since MiwiSoft had all of their products de-listed from the Joomla Extension Directory, we've had substantially less requests for integration with that cart solution. We used to get a request just about every month and were just starting to do initial investigation. Then, they were delisted, and we get a request every 6-8 months now. Because of that, it's simply not something we want to focus on and I don't have any timeline on when, or if, we'd add support. If you get in touch with the MiwiSoft developers and let them know you want integration between the two, we'd gladly talk to them about it. Creating a social profile plugin is usually only about 100 lines of code and it would be great to have more support for other carts. In this case, however, we'd look to their developers to do some of the integration and testing.

Right now, we support HikaShop and Virtuemart as they are very popular and were highly requested before we added support for them.

5) New to Open Graph, I was trying to share an article a member posted on facebook and it looked terrible. I have the old version but it seems to be primarily targeted for one item at a time. And the directions were not that good in regards to how to implement the code onto the page (or I just don't understand it), but either way, is there going to be a Open Graph that basically cures the who site, like Google AdSense code does in HTML files, that will allow, for example, a link from a page in my shop to be displayed in Facebook with proper sized images, or a link from an article, with the professional look you see magazines have when they share their content.

We're always improving our Open Graph support. We have an Open Graph plugin system where we have plugins for about 6 widely used extensions (Joomla Content, K2, EasyBlog, JomSocial, EasySocial and JReviews). These plugins will automatically fetch a very good title, description and image for content from those extensions. Beyond that, there are the Easy-Tags, like {SCOpenGraph image=http://yoursite.com/my-great-image.jpg} that you can add to any page to force the best title, description or image for that page. JFBConnect will also generate a good title and description for all your content based on meta titles and other information.

As a 'catch all', JFBConnect can be setup with some default tags, like an image that should be used on every page when no other image can be determined. This is great for setting your logo up so that on pages that have no image that would be set automatically, at least your logo is shown within the Facebook feed.

Open Graph tags can take some effort to setup, but there's a huge amount of flexibility in how you do so, letting you fully customize your presence on Twitter, Google, LinkedIn and Facebook.

I hope that helps answer your questions, but if you have any others, just let us know.

Thanks,
Alex

"Bug Fix: Social Profiles - Remove deprecated "Alpha User Points Integration" from Social/Misc configuration area".

Ahhh.. I see where the confusion comes from. Previously, we had one setting for AUP integration and it was built-in to JFBConnect. We improved our AUP support by making a separate plugin for it which has more features (profile import, mainly) and is easier to configure. We forgot to remove the previous "Enable AUP Integration" setting from the Misc configuration area. That changelog item was just removing the old configuration option that no longer worked.

I am still looking around for software that allow members to be rewarded for not only inviting their friends, but rewarding them for activation too.

We don't have any method for this. It would take a bit of work to implement and wouldn't be 100% accurate once done. Facebook doesn't return all the information about a user that is coming from an invite (for privacy purposes), which makes it impossible to always match an inviter to the invitee. That's simply a limitation of Facebook that we can't get around. We'd love to be able to reward more upon successful action of the invitee, but Facebook has made this intentionally more difficult over time.

And I think I learned something new, so there was another post where one guy wanted the request to go to notifications, does the FB requests not give any notification at all the receiver, that they received a request? I always assumed it was like a game request or something similar you would see on FB. Do you have any suggestions on other software or in general, that might compliment JFBC in regards to getting this done?

As noted above, Facebook made some large changes to notifications earlier this year. Now, only apps that are in the "Games" category can send them. There's no way around this either, so either you need to classify your app as a Game to use Requests or not use them. That right there may be a limitation you don't want to live with. All requests are treated the same now to notify a user though.

I was curious, does JFBConnect store the information in Joomla's default DB, Jomsocial, or its own database?

JFBConnect stores a very small amount of user information (id, profile link, avatar and some other minor details) in our own database table. We rely on the Joomla user table to store the user's name and on other 3rd party profile extensions to store extended data, if you want those.

With mobile use and mobile app growing, does this affect JFBConnect at all, or future products?

JFBConnect works on many mobile sites and all desktop features should work the same in a mobile environment.

Have you ever thought about making an adserver extension for joomla (be one way to get the word out), or buying Ijoomer.com (think it's for sale) and making joomla sites into actual phone apps or maybe dating integration into Jomsocial? current/smile

We have a lot on our plate right now. We're always looking to add new features to our products, but we're not currently planning on developing wholly new extensions or products (or acquiring other products) at this time.

I hope that helps answer your questions!

Thanks,
Alex