Push != Pull, or Why You Should RTFM

My first idea for an F8 app has tanked. I should have read those docs a little further…

I was making a simple countdown, because lot of friends of mine used their status to count down to an event.

From the FAQ:

Is there a way I can avoid pushing content individually to each user?

You can specify default FBML in your application settings, but if you want the boxes to look different for each user, you must manually push to those users. The content rendered in the profile at the time of display must come entirely from our servers to ensure speed and privacy and some level of design sensibility (hence, this is a “push” and not a “pull” model). You can make dynamic content in response to a user’s interaction with your module (via “mock ajaxv or flash). If there is content you want to share across multiple people’s profiles, consider using the tag.

Well… damn. The countdown won’t update itself upon every profile view.

So I thought, I know… I’ll use a PHP generated image, just like I have on my blog… Nope. From the FBML docs:

img tags will also be handled specially. At publish time, any URLs given for images will be requested by our servers and then served by our own image servers. The src attribute of img tags will be rewritten. This protects the privacy of our users and allows us to better control quality of service of images.

The only other way I can envision doing this is pushing out FBML updates via Cron daily or at a specified interval… think the users would go for that?