Brain Games, the BBC & Facebook Fun

Simon R Jones, Studio 24Barcamb, 24/04/2010

MRC CBU

• MRC Cognition & Brain Sciences Unit

• Cognitive tests to aid research on the effects of brain damage and disease

• Traditional trial = low numbers

• The web enables mass participation

Online trials

• Ran a controlled online trial with a global Pharma in March ’09

• Developed into public site at www.cambridgebrainsciences.com

• 1,800 users, 30,000 plays since Aug ’09

• 300 new users in past week, 4,000 plays

• Tests designed by MRC, built with us in Flex

Brain Test Britain!

• BBC ran a UK Brain Game trial

• 13,000 participants completed

• Tests designed by MRC, built by BBC

• Our tests used as benchmarks

• Paper published by Nature last Tuesday

NO

“The result is crystal clear. Brain training is only as good as spending six weeks using the internet. There is no meaningful difference.”

Dr Adrian Owen, MRC CBU

Site update aims

• Capitalise on Brain Test Britain & Nature report publicity

• Increase public awareness of MRC

• Use Facebook to help increase users

• Helps continuing research at MRC CBU

Facebook Connect

• Login

• Permissions

• Notifications

• Invitations

Login

• Login button via FBML

• JavaScript onlogin callback

• Local Ajax request / business logic

• Returns JSON with status code

• Ask user for Permissions

• Redirect to next page

Notifications

• Notifications.send cancelled in March

• REST API: facebook.links.post

• Sends a link to your public wall

Invitations

• Challenge your friends

• REST API: facebook.stream.publish

• Sends link to your public wall & via email

• More control over message and displayed image

Issues

• Profile images loaded via FBML

• Issues with permissions dialogs

• Lack of sandbox system, test users difficult to setup

• 24 hour caching restriction

Usability

• First-time user process

• Existing users can link FB account

• New users may have FB, may not

• Copywriting is essential

Go live

• SVN tag

• File & Database backups

• Offline page

• Local CSS cache

.htaccess

# Offline page for all users except us

# when making major updates

RewriteEngine on

RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} !=123.123.123.123

RewriteRule ^/(.*) http://domain.com/offline.html [L,R]

HTML

<!-- New site updates message, hidden once new CSS is loaded --><div id="site-update-message-1" style="position: absolute; left: 28%; width: 44%; padding: 5px 3px; z-index: 100; background-color: #FF0; border: 3px solid black; border-top: none; color: #000; font-size: 80%; font-weight: bold; text-align: center;">We've just updated our site to include Facebook integration.<br />Please reload your browser if you can see this message!</div>

CSS

/* Hide new site message */div#site-update-message-1 { display: none;}

And on Wednesday...

The future

• OAuth 2.0

• New Permissions dialog

• Graph API

• Caching

• Contribute code to ZF?

Go play some testswww.cambridgebrainsciences.com