Facebook Developers

If you look at your applications with the Developer application, you may notice a new link for each of the applications you own. Next to the "Edit Settings" link, there is a link to "Feed Templates", which takes you to a page where you can register up to ten story templates for each application.

These story templates are for use with the method feed.publishTemplatizedAction, which is documented here.

There are two main reasons that you may want to register your story templates. First, by registering your template, you will enable us to monitor how much users engage with your stories -- this is data that we will soon be passing along to you in order to help you determine any changes you would like to make to improve your story quality.

Second, for story templates that you register, you are given the option to expand the audience of the News Feed stories to users who have not yet added your application. (By default, an application's stories can only show up in the News Feed of users who have added it.) The stories won't start showing up in non-added users' News Feed yet, but as soon as we roll out the new changes, the stories for templates that you have registered and designated for display to all users will be immediately eligible.

So take a look at the new links in:
http://www.facebook.com/developers/apps.php
and get a head start by registering some templates!

In an effort to provide users more feedback options about the stories applications publish about them, we have added a new option to the process of hiding Mini-Feed stories.

For application-published stories, users can now choose "I didn't do this" in addition to "Hide Story" to inform Facebook of stories that inaccurately represent the user. When a user chooses this option, they will be presented with the additional option of removing the application entirely. This feature is intended to encourage applications to publish Mini-Feed and News Feed stories that are relevant and accurate thereby improving the user experience.

This feedback will also be used in determining the weighting of application-published stories in News Feed.

At Facebook, we care deeply about the future of mobile development. And, today we are taking an open approach to giving you access to two new ways to integrate with Facebook Mobile, making it easier than ever to build for the mobile web.

Profile and Canvas
First, with a new FBML tag (fb:mobile) you will be able to integrate your applications into the mobile XHTML version of Facebook (http://m.facebook.com) on profile and canvas pages. Any content you include in this new tag will be rendered exclusively on the mobile site.

SMS
Second, we are opening methods which enable you to access our SMS platform. This will enable you to directly interact with Facebook users through SMS. Users will also be able to interact with each other through your application by SMS as well.

We think mobile is the next great frontier for developers, and are excited to see the great things that you create with these new and innovative integration points with Facebook Platform.

To see these new integration points in action check out the new Blackberry application on the client side. And, for a full-featured SMS and XHTML integration, check out Causes.

Learn more about Facebook Platform for Mobile here>

Enjoy!

In an effort to continue providing new ways to distribute your applications, we're making the Application Directory and app "about" pages available to people who are not logged in. We are also enabling these pages to be indexed by search engines like Google, Windows Live, Yahoo!, etc., so that everyone can discover your applications, not just current Facebook users. In addition to containing information about your applications, a large part of why app about pages are useful is because of what users have to say about your app. So, we've decided to allow logged out users to read reviews and the discussion board so that they can get a full picture of what an app has to offer.

As always, we've made sure that this change respects everyone's privacy settings. This means that:

• We will show only first names for all users, and a profile picture will be displayed only if the user allows it in their public listing. This includes the developers of the app.
• Logged out users will only have read access to the content on the about pages.

The goal of this change is to increase visibility for your applications, so users can find applications that they love using, and you can have more potential users trying your applications. You should start seeing your application about pages in web search results in a few days.

We will be making a change to the notifications page to include notifications that have been sent by the user. We are doing this so that there is more transparency to users about their application activities and hence less confusion about what apps are sending on their behalf. This requires no implementation changes on the developer's side, but apps that assume the sender of the notification will not see the notification should definitely take note.

We will be rolling this change out next Thursday, October 25th.

We expect Facebook Platform to scale quickly in the upcoming years, we are making some significant changes to support this and thought it would be important that you know about ahead of time. We want to do big things!

Up until this point, all of our user IDs have been small enough that 32 bits is sufficient to store them all. In the not-so-distant future, we will begin using 64 bit object IDs in some places. So, the numbers will become to big to handle in some situations.

In particular, if you are storing IDs as INTs in your MySQL tables, it will be important to alter those columns to become BIGINTs.

We expect this to happen in early November, and hope that this heads up gives you some runway to make the necessary changes.

Happy Hacking!

A few days ago we released API methods for interacting with Marketplace. The new methods (as described on the wiki) allow applications to search marketplace by keyword, category, and user. We also added the extended permission create_listing which allows an application to create Marketplace listings on behalf of a user.

Additionally, we release an updated client library with the Marketplace and data store API methods. Download it here.

Last night we rolled out some more enhancements to the standardized FBML-based requests UI. We added a condensed multi-friend-selector which we think will be a useful alternative way of selecting users to invite to something. We also created a single button UI for sending a request to a specific pre-determined recipient, which we think will satisfy a lot of the use cases that developers have asked for. Finally, we added the ability for the user to include a personalized message with all of these requests (as part of the confirmation screen).

As mentioned when we originally announced the new request form tags, we will be moving ahead with the deprecation of the notifications.sendRequest API method. We will delete this method in 7 days.

We added a new method tonight:
feed.publishTemplatizedAction

This new method provides a superset of the functionality of feed.publishActionOfUser, which we will eventually be deprecating. It allows you to submit “templatized” feed stories for users who have added your application. Just like stories published with feed.publishActionOfUser, these new stories show up in the Mini-Feed of the acting user as well as some of the News Feeds of that user’s friends who have also added your application. The templates allow you to give Facebook some more hints about the structure of your stories, which makes it possible for these stories to aggregate together in the News Feed, forming more interesting stories.

Eventually, we want to make it possible for you to register templates of stories to be visible to all users, not just those who have added your application, so this is our first step towards that goal.

You can read more about the method and see some examples in the wiki:
http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/Feed.publishTemplatizedAction

And you can play around with the new method in the Feed Preview Console:
http://developers.facebook.com/tools.php?feed

If you have any problems with the new method, please report them in our public bug tracking system:
http://bugs.developers.facebook.com/

A couple weeks ago, we announced a new program called fbFund designed to encourage developers to build innovative and engaging new applications by awarding grants to people who are building their businesses on Facebook Platform. These grants are designed to cover startup costs and enable people to take opportunities to build on Facebook Platform they might not have been able to otherwise. fbFund is funded by Accel Partners and The Founders Fund, two of Facebook’s early investors. There’s no equity associated with these fbFund grants, but if recipients need additional funding after receiving a grant from fbFund, Accel Partners and The Founders Fund will have the right to make those investments first, and (if your proposal is selected for a grant) we’ll ask you to sign an agreement with additional details around these terms. For more information and for the online grant application form, check out http://www.facebook.com/developers/fbfund.php. We are very excited to be offering this program and wish you the best of luck whether or not you are an fbFund grant recipient. Thanks for developing! Ps: we had earlier hoped to simply accept proposals through email, but found significant confusion around our standard nonconfidentiality clauses and wanted to be very clear about the conditions of applying for a grant. Because we didn't want anyone to submit their proposals without knowing the various limitations (we of course want to operate in the best faith), we decided that we would have to require all grant applications to be accompanied by an acknowledgment of the nonconfidentiality clause. We apologize for the inconvenience of resubmitting -- we decided that it was most important that applicants clearly understand the terms under which they're submitting proposals, and there wasn't an easy way to do that.

You can now make officially sanctioned test accounts

Full details are posted on the wiki here:
http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php?title=Test_Accounts
but here is the short version of the important parts:

To make a test account, register on Facebook as you normally would. Then, when logged in to the test account, go to this URL:
http://www.facebook.com/developers/become_test_account.php

A few important things to note:

• * Test accounts won't be able to see real Facebook users and vice versa. You can make an existing account a test account, but if that account is friends with a real account, each user will disappear from the other's list of friends.
• * Our customer support team won't disable test accounts for being fake, but test accounts may be disabled for violating any other reason that a real account would be disabled.
• * Only real accounts may be listed as application owners. In other words, you may not list a test account as the developer of an app.