Facebook Developers

We're releasing some updates to stream story formatting, FQL, and finding fans this week. These changes are going live with the weekly code push, which takes place Tuesday evening, Pacific Time.

Switching from the video Attachment Type

We're removing all reference to the video attachment type in stream stories. You should use the flash attachment type, since the flash type gives you more control over how your stories render.

While we'll continue to publish stories that use the video type, we strongly encourage you to start using the flash attachment type instead.

Finding Fans without a Session

You can call pages.isFan without a session key now, so you can determine whether a user is a fan of a Facebook Page without the user needing to authorize your application.

Ensuring User Privacy with FQL

You can help ensure user privacy in your applications by checking whether a given user has blocked the logged-in user. Select the is_blocked field when you query the user FQL table.

Rendering Stream Stories

As another reminder regarding the stream roadmap, next week we're changing the size of stream story images so that their maximum dimensions will be 90x90 pixels.

Also starting next week, if you include more than one image in your stream attachment, Facebook will render only the first image in the array initially. We're also adding a "See More" link so the user can see the remaining images. You can still include up to 5 images in a stream story.

We'll make another announcement on the Platform Live Status page next week confirming this launch.

We hope you start using these features and we welcome your feedback on the Developer Forum.

Pete, the technical writer on the Platform team, is rounding up the news.

Over the past few years, we've worked hard to open source large pieces of our infrastructure such as Thrift, Scribe, and Hive, as we continue to take steps to support the open community and build a scalable, secure, and sustainable identity platform. Along with the code itself, what makes it possible for you to freely use these technologies is a set of well known open source software licenses such as Apache, BSD, and GPL. When it comes to open standards, this same sort of legal structure does not yet exist. About a year ago, we supported the creation of the Open Web Foundation in an effort to make it easier for diverse communities to create open specifications for the next generation of web technologies. Just as there are well known software licenses for open source software, the Open Web Foundation announced today that they've produced what will hopefully become a well known legal agreement for open standards.

Today we join Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, and others within the Open Web Foundation community in publishing this agreement and applying it to an initial set of specifications. We all have made the OAuth Core 1.0a and OAuth WRAP specifications available under the terms of version 0.9 of the Open Web Foundation Agreement. At a high level this means that we're helping to ensure OAuth can be freely and broadly implemented by anyone -- large companies, individual developers, and open source projects -- around the world. While we're starting with OAuth today, we intend to make additional technologies available under the terms of this agreement in the future.

Switching gears to the technology, we currently use OAuth 1.0a which allows us to use the same code when interacting with APIs from Google and some of our other partners. For instance, two weeks ago Facebook engineer Luke Shepard and I worked with many folks in the OAuth community at the Internet Identity Workshop on how it could support many of the flows within Facebook Connect that our developers use every day. Several companies and individuals involved in OAuth efforts have started working on the next evolution of OAuth, known as OAuth WRAP.

While you might not have heard of OAuth WRAP until today, we're quite supportive of the effort. In fact, we intend to contribute to it, and hope to see the technology become part of the next generation of OAuth within the IETF.

David Recordon, senior open programs manager, needs all of your help to create an open, standardized, social web. (want a job?)

We're excited to announce our official support for the Microsoft SDK for Facebook Platform, which Microsoft released today.

This SDK contains rich social features and offers something for almost any kind of Facebook developer who is building with Microsoft technology, whether you're implementing Facebook Connect or are building a Web-based or desktop application. If you're one of the six million Microsoft software developers just starting to build for Facebook, you can use this SDK to make your applications more social, letting your users share and connect with their friends.

If you're building on the Web, you can use the ASP.NET library to easily build Facebook Connect sites or canvas applications using APIs and a rich set of ready-made Facebook controls. On the desktop, you can easily integrate Facebook Connect into your Silverlight, WPF, or Windows Forms applications.

The Microsoft SDK for Facebook Platform joins the ranks of our other supported libraries, alongside PHP, JavaScript, iPhone, Adobe ActionScript 3.0, and Force.com. You can check out the libraries with which you can build on Facebook -- both officially supported and community supported -- in the Client Libraries article on the Developer Wiki.

Releasing this SDK is Microsoft's latest move in helping make the Web more social. When we held our Facebook Technology Tasting event this past April, Microsoft was there to showcase applications built on Silverlight and .NET that utilize the latest features of Facebook Platform, such as the Open Stream API.

Start building today at www.microsoft.com/facebooksdk.

Wei, a software engineer on Facebook Platform, is working on making the Web more open and social.