

Ask HN: I've got a question about Facebook and Twitter integration - dglassan

I've got an e-book that I'm writing and I want to offer it on my website for $5 to download. Now I know there are some people that won't want to pay for the e-book so I want to give them an opportunity to download the e-book in exchange for sending out a status update on facebook or a tweet saying that they just downloaded the e-book.<p>My question is: is it possible to integrate facebook and/or twitter into a website and let the user download a file only after they send out a tweet or status update? I have some experience with PHP but would probably have to hire someone to do the work for me.<p>I feel like it should be possible to check to see if they update their status/send a tweet, I'm just not quite sure how to go about doing it.<p>One problem I can see with this distribution model: how would you prevent people from creating a new account to send the status update/tweet if they do not want to bug their friends about an e-book they just downloaded?
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Mithrandir
There's no way to prevent people from making fake Twitter/Facebook accounts to
get your book.

Perhaps you could make it so that people have to have a certain amount of
friends/followers to get the book for free.

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dglassan
that's what I was thinking but I want to hear from someone that's worked with
integrating facebook/twitter into their site.

also, does anyone know exactly how the integration would work? do the services
set a variable to true once the update/tweet goes out that you can then go
check to make sure the tweet went out or the status was updated?

