Like a Candidate

Vice President Selections

2008-08-23T14:02:00.002-04:00

Now that Obama has announced that Delaware Sen. Joe Biden will be his running mate, how would you like to see this (if at all) represented in Like a Candidate? We are looking for feedback from YOU to help shape the application!

Please feel free to provide your thoughts on our application here, or as always send us an email!

Bob Barr Added To Like a Candidate

2008-08-03T00:21:00.003-04:00

Today we were finally able to find some time and now have added Bob Barr to Like a Candidate. After updating the application we ran the matching algorithm against all users and there are now 92 people that are like Bob Barr!

Here were the numbers prior to adding Barr:

Obbama - 255
Mccain - 220
Nader - 81

Here are the results after:

Obama - 247
Mccain - 134
Barr - 92
Nader - 83

We have sent a notification to all Like a Candidate users and encourage you to take another look and find out if you are now matched to Bob Barr or Like a Candidate!

Google, YouTube Presidential Forum?

2008-07-06T15:38:00.004-04:00

Have you heard that Google and YouTube have announced plans for a major post-convention presidential forum in New Orleans? At this point there has been little coverage on the topic and no confirmation as to which candidates have been invited to attend. In an attempt to ensure all candidates are represented, Like a Candidate has released a Google Gadget to bring awareness to the issue and ensure that Ralph Nader is included in the forum.

Here is a link to the Google Gadget: http://www.google.com/ig/directory?url=www.likeacandidate.com/naderpoll/gadget.x ml

Who are you like now that Ron Paul is out?

2008-06-17T21:24:00.003-04:00

With the announcement that Ron Paul has dropped out of the presidential race what happens to the people that are most like him?

There were 35 people that had the application installed and were like Ron Paul. Today we removed him from the application and ran the matching algorithm against those affected to see who they are now most like!

Here are the results:

7 are now like Barack Obama
28 are now like John McCain

We have sent a notification to all that were affected with this change and if you were planning to vote for Ron Paul we encourage you to take another look and find out if you are Like a Candidate!

Who are you like now that Hillary is out?

2008-06-08T19:04:00.005-04:00

With the announcement that Hillary has suspended her campaign what happens to the people that are most like her? One of Like a Candidate's main goals was to ensure that our application did not contain an outdated subset of candidates. We have been following the race very carefully and it is now time for us to make our first change to The Candidates and remove Hillary Clinton from the application.

There were 65 people that had the application installed and were like Hillary Clinton. Today we removed Hillary from the application and ran the matching algorithm against those affected to see who they are now most like!

Here are the results:

45 are now like Barack Obama
12 are now like John McCain
6 are now like Ralph Nader
2 are now like Ron Paul

We have sent a notification to all that were affected with this change and if you were planning to vote for Hillary we encourage you to take another look and find out if you are Like a Candidate!

As always we appreciate all of the feedback that we have received so far and if you are interested in helping to work on the application with us please let us know!

Like a Candidate Website Released

2008-05-27T23:46:00.004-04:00

The Like a Candidate website has been released! While users will still need to use the Facebook application to take the quiz and compare to friends there is some new functionality on the website.

Here are some of the features:

See the current standings of the candidates on Like a Candidate!
See detailed positions for each candidate (Obama, McCain, Clinton, Nader, Ron Paul)
See current news for each candidate (Obama, McCain, Clinton, Nader, Ron Paul)

You can see the details of the race here!

Like a Candidate Application Released on Facebook Platform

2008-05-05T00:07:00.002-04:00

ARLINGTON, VA, May 5, 2008 – Like a Candidate, an application built on the Facebook® platform helps individuals make an informed decision in the upcoming 2008 presidential election, opened for public use on 5 May 2008. The application was created following a realization that there was a need to clarify politics in an engaging, social ecosystem. There were, and still are, numerous political matching quizzes, applications and services. Some of these services are managed by private interests to meet their own requirements, while others contain an outdated subset of candidates or have significant limitations in regards to functionality and usage. None are simultaneously comprehensive, provide evidence on candidate positions, assist with understanding alignment or swing scores, and have distribution through the social graph. The Like a Candidate team set out to implement an application that meets all those requirements.

The Like a Candidate application has been successful in fulfilling its original objectives. The application concentrated at first on establishing a solid development team, on creating the technical infrastructure to integrate with and establishing core functionality. These goals have been met, and the team is now planning its next stage of growth and enhancements. After a significant period of development and testing, Like a Candidate is now open for public use and adoption. “We hope that Like a Candidate will provide people with more conviction in voting for the candidate that best represents their own personal politics.” says Chris Newby, one of the project leaders.

In its initial release phase, the Like a Candidate application has been specifically deployed as a application that allows users to determine which candidate they are most like and to be able to compare to their friends. Like a Candidate's main goal is to be complete and to be without bias. Many voters feel overwhelmed by the election process due to the tremendous amount of information coming from so many different sources. Like a Candidate has the potential to serve as one-stop shopping for all political needs for the upcoming presidential election. “We know that one of the biggest issues voters face is information overload.” says Newby. “We believe that Like a Candidate will enable voters to sift through the hype and take them directly to specific candidate information.”

Like a Candidate is relatively new in the arena of political applications but the core team has extensive experience and a wide variety of technical, social, and political backgrounds. It was first conceived in mid 2007, and the team has already put in place much of the organization, technology, and processes needed to meet its initial goals. Continuing to build on a solid foundation, however, will allow Like a Candidate to implement substantial enhancements and additional functionality allowing the application to become more central to organizing and distributing political information through the social graph. The upcoming year promises not just incremental improvements to Like a Candidate, but also continued innovation as the project builds partnerships and seeks funding from aligned organizations. "Like a Candidate has created an engine that can be used to help voters find their match in any election." says Jake Kouns, one of the project leaders. "We are very excited about the initial release and the future opportunities." Facebook is the sixth-most trafficked website in the United States.

Like a Candidate can be found at http://www.likeacandidate.com

Press Contact:

Like a Candidate
1021 Arlington Blvd, Suite 718
Arlington, VA 22209

Chris Newby
+1.703.371.7134
Email: cnewby@likeacandidate.com

Jake Kouns
+1.804.306.8412
Email: jkouns@likeacandidate.com

Facebook® is a registered trademark of Facebook Inc.

to FBML or not to FBML

2008-03-04T19:42:00.000-05:00

if you've looked into developing for Facebook, you've hopefully recognized that your first big design decision involves the choice between an iframe style app, and a Facebook Markup Language (FBML) style app. many pros and cons for either can be found in the Facebook documentation and around the net, no need to regurgitate them in depth here.

however, i was a little concerned over the lack of guidance on this topic out there in the vast tube pile, both from Facebook and otherwise. for example, i didn't see many "this is what i need to do, this is what i tried, this is what worked and what didn't" type articles.

well, i'm still new to everything, but i did commit to creating an FBML app. and i figured i'd share some brief points on why i eventually made that choice.

first, the only reasons i considered iframe in the first place was 1) the obvious, that is, low learning curve and ease of porting, and 2) my prototype app is using a slick slider control built on top of the Asp.Net Ajax Toolkit Slider Extension control. in fact, the slider control was kind of a show stopper at first. it makes my app very ergonomic and i've become attached to it, but it uses a lot of javascript, and that doesn't really fly well in the FBML model.

but then it occurred to me: while my slider is slick and works well, so are all the Facebook controls i'll have access to with FBML. weighing the options, i'll spend a lot less time retooling my slider for FBML than i would reinventing all the functionality available with FBML. more importantly, Facebook will surely extend FBML going forward and who knows what else i'll have access to down the road as FBML feels more functionality demand.

and then i saw a headline that Facebook will be rolling out overall site design changes soon and it kinda sealed the deal for me. i'm never in the mood to hand mod CSS and image files and to unjumble html according to some whim.

so it goes like this, man up and learn FBML because:

Easy integration with the FB user experience
Easy integration with the FB aesthetic
Performance. Performance. Performance. FB includes a caching scheme with FBML, so why spend ur own money on extra bytes and cycles when FB is willing to?
The learning curve on FBML is minimal, you can do it, i beleive in you!
Automatic exposure to any upgrades FB makes to FBML, upgrades they will surely make

debugging facebook fbml Asp.net apps locally with Visual Studio 2005

2008-03-04T19:19:00.000-05:00

the title is a bit of a mouthful, but that's the best i could put it. i've been planning the port of my prototype app, Like a Candidate, to Facebook for the last couple days and, naturally, debugging my app as it's called from Facebook was one of my early concerns.

but before i get to the solution, i should explain that i specifically included "fbml" in the title of this post because my solution might not be so involved were i developing an iframe app. i previously posted a little on why i chose the FBML route if you're interested.

my solution is based on Jerome Paradis' equaled wordy titled post Debugging an ASP.Net FBML Facebook Application using Visual Studio 2005. with a few differences tho. for example, he's using Facebook.Net and for the moment i'm using the Facebook Developer Toolkit. for more on your options as a .Net developer, check out this Facebook wiki. i'm actually eyeing fbasync at the moment as well ... so when i make my mind up, i'll be sure to post.

regardless of what utility api you chose, if any at all, these steps should still apply as long as your going with FBML, which you should :)

also, a word on my setup: i'm using an HP pavilion laptop, running Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate and Kaspersky Internet Security 6, developing with Visual Studio .Net 2005.

so without further adieu:

get your developer and app configured on Facebook. many helpful posts on this, but start here if you need. just make sure you select "Use FBML" under the "Canvas Page URL" settings.
when you configred your app on Facebook you were asked to specify a few different URLs. if you understand the purpose of these URLs then you might also understand that "localhost" can't be used if your using FBML (whereas localhost is perfectly fine for iframe apps). this is because when using FBML, calls to your app will cause Facebook to call your URLs and parse the results "behind the scene" before returning to the results to the user.

so, when using FBML you must specify URLs that can be resolved from Facebook. so your first problem in debugging apps is: how do i give Facebook a URL that resolves back to my development machine that's behind a firewall and is issued dynamic IPs?

the easiest way to do this, IMO, is to start with a dynamic DNS service. I went with DynDNS, it's easy to register and configure, and it's free. so register with them and configure a host, something like: myfacebookapp.dyndns.org and point it at the IP address of your primary interface to the Internet. in my case, a Netgear wireless router. if you're still unsure, use the IP address displayed for you from whatismyip.com.
Assuming you're using a router, first configure your router for dynamic DNS. it'll ask for your username and password from DynDNS (or wherever) and that's a-ok. the point of doing this is that if for some reason you're issued a new IP from your ISP, your router will automatically update your dynamic DNS host to use the new IP.
Configure your router to forward port 80 traffic to your machine within your local area network. That is, configure your router to forward 80 traffic to the subnet IP of your development machine. your subnet IP is the one that comes up when running ipconfig from the Windows command prompt.
if you're using a firewall, now would be a good time to configure it to allow 80 traffic on your local machine. instead of opening your machine up wide for port 80, you might want to use an IP filter. Use the same IP from step 2 and use 204.15.23.0 with the subnet mask 255.255.255.0 which will allow your machine to receive requests from the Facebook servers.
now would also be a good time to setup a new Asp.Net project in Visual Studio. Jerome Paradis recommends using a Web Application Project. You can do this, but I just used the default project type (i forget what it's called, but it's the one that uses the local Cassini virtual server to run your code). Paradis points out that you can't forward traffic to this type of application, and he's correct. however, you can configure your local IIS to host as an Asp.Net web application from your Asp.Net project directory.

to do this, open up your local IIS management UI (if you don't know how to do this, ur in the wrong place). Create a new website (or virtual folder if you prefere) and specify the host name you created in step 2 in your new site's header Host Header settings. This will cause IIS to forward requests for myfacebookapp.dyndns.org to your new site, and thus your Asp.Net code.
relax, you're basically done at this point. the only thing left is to set up a test page, call it from facebook, and see if you can attach your debugger to the request. so you set up your app already in facebook at this point, and you specified a URL for "Callback Url". if this callback URL looked like http://myfacebookapp.dyndns.org, then you want to add a page to your Asp.Net project called default.aspx that sits in the projects root directory (there's likely already one there).

this page will be the one called by facebook. so get rid of all the markup in default.aspx, and just add "hello world". then in the code behind, add some nonsense code to the page_load handler. now browse to your page locally, as you normally would with any other Asp.Net project and make sure everything is working. next try browsing your page from IIS.

once you're convinced everything is working so far, go to facebook and go to your new apps Canvas page URL. this should be something like http://apps.facebook.com/myfacebookapp. if the page comes up, you're good to go on to the next step. if not, you'll have to rely on those keen, extrasensory debugging skills they don't teach you in school :)
with everything else working, all you need to do is set a break point in your default page code-behind's page_load handler, then in Visual Studio, go to Debug -> Attach to Process.. -> find the approriate worker process (for me it was w3wp.exe, for you it may be inetinfo.exe, or may even be an instance of svchost.exe) -> Click Attach.

refreshing your canvas page from Facebook should now hit your breakpoint.

or at least, it works for me ... apologies for the lack of visual aids in this post, but hey it's better than nothin friends :)