title: How do web applications post Facebook news feed items and notifications without the user being active in the FB app?
body: <p>I have an existing Rails web application which I would like to integrate with Facebook, so that when the user takes actions in my application news items containing external links are later posted to the users wall / feed by a daemon which summarises the latest activity. I don't need single signon etc. at present, just the ability to send updates.</p>
  
  <p>I would also like to be able to send notifications to the user's friends if they are also using the app, but I'd be happy with just the news feed functionality.</p>
  
  <p>I'm working off the pragmatic programmer's book Facebook Platform Development by Michael Mangino, which uses the facebooker plugin, and early on the book says this:</p>
  
  <blockquote>
    <p>Facebook uses sessions to verify that
    our application is performing actions
    on behalf of an active user. When we
    want to send a notification on behalf
    of our user, we will provide Facebook
    with that user’s session information.
    Facebook will verify that the session
    does in fact belong to the requesting
    user and will also verify that the
    user has been active on our
    application within the past hour.
    Facebook uses the session to prevent
    applications from taking action on
    behalf of a user who isn’t actively
    using them</p>
  </blockquote>
  
  <p>What counts as 'being active in the application' and what does it mean in this context? I have seen other apps that do things like automatically publish RSS feeds to a user's profile so it does seem to be possible to have similar apps where the only interaction is a one-off install and configure. </p>
  
  <p>How do these apps work and is it possible to get at this functionality from facebooker? </p>