Guest Post: New Facebook App, AsteriskWatch

Hi, Matt Riddell of the Daily Asterisk News here. Over the past few weeks I’ve put the finishing touches on a new Facebook application called AsteriskWatch.

Basically, it’s a hub for Asterisk users on Facebook. It started as a place to post links and view various Asterisk news articles, and has evolved to include a “Karma” section.

Karma is handed out based on a growing list of tasks that you can do to improve Asterisk as a whole; ranging from having patches committed to Asterisk, to writing documentation for Asterisk.

Every few days I’ll add some new items that you can receive Karma for.

The idea here is to get people involved in making Asterisk as powerful and user-friendly as possible.

From the Karma page you can see a sorted list of all of the members, with the highest Karma at the top. Each person is either highlighted with green, red or white.

If a user is green it means that they are available for contracting, red means they are not, and white means they haven’t specified.

The idea behind this is that if you need some complicated work done for Asterisk, you can choose a member with a high Karma value, and if you have work that is not so complicated you can get someone with a lower Karma value (in order to give them experience in working with Asterisk).

Each entry provides a link to a short description of the person as well as their URL. Once you are on their AsteriskWatch profile, you can click on their name to add them as a friend on Facebook.

There are also sections for adding links, VoIP providers and events.

Under your settings page you can specify which version of Asterisk you use and what you like about Asterisk.

This information will be added to a box which shows up on your profile. This shows people that you use Asterisk and is effectively free advertising for the Open Source project.

Don’t forget to check out the changes page to see what has changed since you last logged in - you’ll see things I’ve added, as well as things I’d like to add.

I had wanted to develop a Facebook application for Asterisk, as it didn’t seem there was any easy way to get together with other Asterisk users. As I went through the development process I gradually (over 3 days) added features to flesh it out.

Developing a FaceBook application wasn’t really that hard. It’s basically a PHP and MySQL backend, but you need to learn FBML and FBJS (FaceBook Markup Language and FaceBook JavaScript).

AsteriskWatch is by no means a static application and via the discussion boards you are more than welcome to suggest a feature you would like to see or a task you believe should gain you Karma.

I hope you all enjoy the application! Give me a yell if you have any questions: matt@venturevoip.com