Applications for the popular foursquare platform are exploding onto the market. Foursquare, which allows users to create and visit virtual venues the way Farmville allows users to create farms, enabling users to visit each other’s “venues” and “check-in”. Venues can be virtual representations of businesses, places, causes or concepts. Similar to the way Facebook users form groups to display their likes and dislikes Foursquare users traffic the virtual venues they like.  

 The era of the mobile game has arrived. The mobile game utilizes GPS technology and is taking the world by storm. A mobile game uses a player’s geographic locations to create gaming content blending the real world the virtual world. From blended reality treasure hunts and mock turf wars to a capture-the-flag-styled mobile game and virtual ghost hunting the new world of the mobile game offers a unique range of alternative ways to make use of the GPS technology. This alternative use for GPS is helping to strengthen the demand for GPS on mobile devices and is paving the way for a future filled with mobile games using a player’s geo location as a part of the game. This blending of an ordinary reality with virtual reality is the beginning of a technological breakthrough we’ll soon see skew further the line of what player’s consider real and not. 

 As the Android vs iPhone debate rages the bottom line becomes clear: Android is open source which allows users to create their own interface and apps. This ability to customize apps for each individual android user fuels the Android vs iPhone debate by offering an alternative to Apple’s neatly trimmed garden of Apps. This customizability creates a more personal connection with the device both psychologically and technically. 

With the seemingly endless number of based games pervading Facebook, educational social gaming aims to use this new form of entertainment to educate. Having played a number of these games, I feel reinvention of these games into venues users can learn from is something that could help them outside the virtual world. Imagine how much more would be known about sustainability, organic farming and renewable energy had Farmville embedded content teaching the benefits of sustainable technologies and organic farming?  

Games like Farmville and Happy Aquarium provide endless virtual advertising space customizable to each individual’s interests based on their choices within the game. Designing an educational social gaming platform, geared towards educating users about products, their uses, and the brands available to them could be the key to harnessing younger generations learning and buying power.  

While building a facebook applicaiton that will be utilized across 100's of pages it was found a slight challenge to grab the current url dynamically...

First try:

function curPageURL() {
 $pageURL = 'http';
 if ($_SERVER["HTTPS"] == "on") {$pageURL .= "s";}
 $pageURL .= "://";
 if ($_SERVER["SERVER_PORT"] != "80") {
  $pageURL .= $_SERVER["SERVER_NAME"].":".$_SERVER["SERVER_PORT"].$_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"];
 } else {
  $pageURL .= $_SERVER["SERVER_NAME"].$_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"];
 }
 return $pageURL;
}
 
$currenturl = curPageURL();

A simple curl call was tried, however the server where the .php was was called not the facebook url

What worked:

<?php

$pageid = $_REQUEST['fb_sig_page_id'];

//grabs the current page id then use the current page id with the graph api

So This helpful entry hopefully helps some one trying to dynamically retrieve some facebook id for the the fan page the user is currently looking at.

I searched the Facebook documentation and referred consistently to this but didn't straight explain how to get this dynamic variable in php.

So it's quite simple really once you find it but you can see it here:  This will allow you to retrieve the current page's id... no need to curl it and parse the id, it's right here.

<?php

print $_REQUEST['fb_sig_page_id'];

?>

We used this is the implementation and delivery of the juno wallet facebook fanpage application which can be seen here:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Apollo-Matrix-LLC/120845234620618?v=app_13...

hope this helps, and as always apollo matrix can help with all of your face book apps...