1. Brain Games, the BBC
& Facebook Fun
Simon R Jones, Studio 24
Barcamb, 24/04/2010

2. 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

3. 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

7. 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

9. N O

10. “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

11. 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

12. Facebook Connect
• Login
• Permissions
• Notifications
• Invitations

13. 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

14. Notifications
• Notifications.send cancelled in March
• REST API:
facebook.links.post
• Sends a link to your public wall

15. Invitations
• Challenge your friends
• REST API:
facebook.stream.publish
• Sends link to your public wall & via email
• More control over message and displayed
image

16. Issues
• Profile images loaded via FBML
• Issues with permissions dialogs
• Lack of sandbox system, test users difficult
to setup
• 24 hour caching restriction

17. Usability
• First-time user process
• Existing users can link FB account
• New users may have FB, may not
• Copywriting is essential

21. Go live
• SVN tag
• File & Database backups
• Offline page
• Local CSS cache

22. .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]

25. 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>

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

27. And on Wednesday...

30. The future
• OAuth 2.0
• New Permissions dialog
• Graph API
• Caching
• Contribute code to ZF?

31. Go play some tests
www.cambridgebrainsciences.com