Platform Updates: Operation Developer Love

By Sean Quinlan - Wednesday, August 8, 2012 at 5:45pm

Since last Wednesday's update, we upgraded the payments reporting system to a new payment reporting API and launched subscriptions for apps. World HACK 2012 was announced with 12 cities on the tour. We also introduced a beta program for mobile apps in ads. We added support for timezones in events and date-only events. Lastly, we launched the new Facebook SDK 3.0 for iOS.

New Metrics Added to Insights

We added 4 new metrics to Insights:

post_impressions_fan
post_impressions_fan_unique
post_impressions_fan_paid
post_impressions_fan_paid_unique

Learn more about these metrics and Insights in our documentation.

Exporting data from Facebook

We've updated our policies to further clarify that Facebook Platform cannot be used to export user data into a competitive social network without our permission. Facebook Platform is designed to enable rich social apps, and should not be used as a data export tool. As we explained in September, we offer Download Your Information for users wanting to export their data from Facebook.

Upcoming September Breaking Changes

As announced in June, the following breaking changes will go into effect on September 5th, 2012:

Deleting FB.Canvas.setAutoResize
Renaming 'likes' property of Comments and 'votes' property of QuestionOptions
Minor change to admin.getAppProperties call
Returning actual size in photo_src table

Check out the Developer Roadmap for more info.

November Breaking Changes (90-day notice)

The following change will go into effect on November 7th, 2012:

No more payments reporting emails
We will stop sending payments reporting emails. You can download daily reports of transaction data using our Payments Reporting API.

The following changes can all be enabled/disabled using the "November 2012 Breaking Changes" migration until November 7th when they will go into effect permanently for everyone:

Actor name will always match the access token
Today when posting to a Page with a user access token for an admin of that Page, it's possible (depending on the user's settings) for the post to show up as coming from either the user or the Page. Going forwards, all actions will use the name of whatever entity the access token belongs to. If using a user access token, the name of the user will be used. If using a Page access token, the name of the Page will be used.

Notifications table no longer returns pid/aid for photos/albums
The object_id field on the notification FQL table will return photo ids and album ids (called object_id and album_object_id respectively in the photo FQL table) instead of pid and aid.

New permission required to read Page mailboxes
In order to read a Page's mailbox (PAGE_ID/conversations in the Graph API or unified_* FQL tables), you will need the read_page_mailboxes permission. The read_mailbox permission will now only give you access to a user's mailbox.

The following change can be enabled/disabled using the "External Page Migration" setting until November 7th when it will go into effect permanently for everyone:

Like Buttons and Stories to the Right Audience
We're updating the way you restrict the audience for the Like button, as part of the Like Button Migration, and resulting stories to give you more control. Going forward, in order to limit the distribution of age gating stories to people in the appropriate country or age group, you must include a metatag on your URLs indicating the restriction. Please review our documentation on how to do this. For more details, see the blog post where we announced this breaking change.

Weekly Stats

The following stats are for activity between Wednesday, August 1 and Wednesday, August 8:

Bugs Activity

180 bugs were reported
33 bugs were reproducible and accepted (after duplicates removed)
5 bugs were by design
34 bugs were fixed
56 bugs were duplicate, invalid, or need more info

Bugs Fixed

Activity on facebook.stackoverflow.com