Domain at F8

When searching for a new home it’s useful to know what is nearby. You can figure out your new local coffee shop or the closest gym before you make the big move. Facebook Places Graph is a new API that retrieves nearby places based on the supplied location. These locations have been used internally within Facebook’s apps and are now being made available to all developers. For this year’s F8 (Facebook’s annual developer conference) Domain’s Android team worked with Facebook to integrate this new functionality into our application.

Power your app with the Places Graph. We're providing free access to the same place data that powers Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger. Learn how to use data about 140M+ places around the world to create location aware app experiences. - Facebook Places Team

Under twenty partner companies were selected to test out and integrate the new API before the F8 conference commenced. Domain was included with the likes of Samsung and Nike to showcase how Facebook Places can be used in existing mobile applications. This gave us the chance to get our hands on this data before anyone else and more importantly; get it into the hands of our users.

How we built it

The use case was simple; when a user is viewing a property, allow them to view nearby places based on their personal preferences. This involves making a request to the API supplying the property’s location and filtering the results by the user’s selected categories. Besides implementation, I also had to collaborate with the designers and testers here at Domain to ensure that the new feature not only looked good but didn’t throw any unexpected errors.

The challenges

Working with an unreleased API that is in beta was a pretty fun challenge. The documentation wasn’t fully complete and I stumbled across a couple of bugs (after all it is in active development). Despite a few hurdles it was a great experience to test out something cutting edge and have a direct line of contact with the developers at Facebook. Soon enough all my issues were resolved and the new feature was ready to be shipped into production.

Facebook Places implemented in the Domain Android App

Why we AB test

Here at Domain, AB testing is a big part of how we release new features and measure their impact. Instead of rolling out the newly implemented feature to all our users at once we released it to a small percentage of our audience. We will closely monitor usage over the following weeks to understand how users interact with this new feature and most importantly which categories they select.

The new API was introduced in the presentation: Explore the power of the Places Graph (you can see Domain’s honourable mention at the 10:10 mark). It was a great experience to develop this feature in a couple of weeks and ship it to production in time for the event.

Facebook Places Launch Partners

Like this article? Keep up to date with all the tech updates from Domain by following our LinkedIn page here.