As a facebook hacker, I'd be interesting in seeing what the instructional popups you made look like.

I think asking for the bare minimum as you need it is absolutely the way to go as tons of people bounce out of apps that need all kinds of permissions before they get to even see the app. I get sick of seeing apps that want offline publish access before I even know what the app is because the developers are lazy and just request all permissions available.

I'll definitely be able to show you soon. We're finishing up a few final touches on our beta, but signup now and we'll send you a beta invite asap! We should be ready on Monday. http://feedtopic.com has a signup on the beta roadblock.

In the meantime, I can give you a quick description of what we have going on: each link that requires an extra permission not asked up front has a listener that will check what permissions are available. If it's missing a permission, we actually trigger a Facebox (from @defunkt's facebook lib). The Facebox defaults are really clean. Light overlay, slight shadow, nothing fancy. We put in different messages for different actions, one for example: "Yes you can like someone's post from FeedTopic! We need a new permission from Facebook to do this for you. Click the 'Add Permission' button to bring up Facebook's Permissions page". We have a button that looks SUPER clickable, like if you didn't click it you'd feel horrible because it has nice css gradients and looks like it's 3D. Underneath we have a message that says: "We won't publish anything without your direct permission to any part of Facebook, promise". Once you click the button, it will show you the FB permission prompt. yes, it's multiple steps, but it's clean and makes people feel really confident. BTW, liking something on feedtopic is probably the last thing people are going to the site for ;) It's just a small piece of info I can give away for now before the launch.