Game Stores on Facebook II

I'm out of town this week with a lot of down time with friends and family as we all assemble for a funeral. I was mentioning to my friend Jeff how I manually kept a list of game stores with Facebook pages and how I was just about burned out on the project. Jeff is highly technical, so the discussion inevitably led to how this tedious process could be automated.

90 minutes later he had written a program to do just that. It uses PHP scripting against the Facebook API to grab the Facebook store information. After another hour, he had it sorting, ignoring duplicates and including the logos. My contribution was gathering the store IDs and debugging the input until it worked. The new page is here and it's now a 10 minute update instead of a 90 minute update, which means I'll likely keep doing it.

About 10% of the stores were removed from the list, as the Facebook API doesn't work well with Groups, yet another reason to dump your group and move to a page. Since I had to manually tweak the process for each game store, please take a look and let me know if any are missing. Also let me know if I need to add new ones (game stores with pages that have fan counts over 100).

If you want to get a good idea of what's happening in the retail tier of the game trade, you could do a lot worse than follow the top ten or so stores on this list.