Facebook Developers

Tonight we added a photo upload suite to Platform, which for the first time allows applications to contribute content directly to Facebook. The suite consists of three new methods:

• photos.addTag
• photos.createAlbum
• photos.upload

These methods will allow the creation of photo exporters and plugins for a wide range of sources, from desktop applications to online photo sharing sites to photo capture devices. All uploaded photos are considered "pending," and must be approved by the user on Facebook before becoming publicly visible.

See photo uploads for a description of how these methods should be used as part of an application's workflow.

Last week we released a whole new version of Platform. On the surface it may look similar to the old version, but under the hood it is a totally new implementation. And, starting today you can enjoy the benefits of that new implementation by getting direct access to a more powerful, flexible way of accessing Facebook data - a query language we call FQL.

FQL enables you to reduce the number of method calls you need to make in order to get at the data you need, and allows you to specify more precisely what data you care about. This means less unnecessary data transfer back and forth between your app and the server.

More importantly, FQL was fun for us to build, and should be even more fun for you to play around with. Check out the overview and then give it a try!

Since launching the Facebook Platform in beta, we have heard some great feedback on our features from all of you. As we mature the Facebook Platform to 1.0, we've taken your suggestions seriously and made some cool new changes.

This release includes all-new methods for adding social context to your app utilizing Facebook data. The changes include:

• New methods for interacting with notifications, groups, photo tags, and more.
• A well-defined XML language with public XML Schema document. This can be used to generate parsers, validate our output, or just generally serve as unambiguous documentation for Facebook Platform methods.
• No more encoded ids - we use real Facebook identifiers for events, groups, users, networks, photos, and albums.
• Reusable types like photos and locations for more intelligent parsing and client code.
• suitable framework for many more exciting developments to come in the near future.

While these changes will make the Facebook Platform more powerful, and more intuitive to use, they also mean that existing applications will need to be updated in order to continue working properly. The new service is available at the same api.facebook.com/restserver.php endpoint if you pass a version parameter v set to 1.0 in your GET or POST arguments. Passing no v parameter will return our original XML. The old version of the XML will be available until March 22, 2007. After that date, Facebook makes no guarantee about the availability of that XML format. Please contact developers-help@facebook.com with any questions or concerns.

A guide for updating your app to Facebook Platform 1.0 can be found here.

Our goal has always been to make features of the Facebook Platform as useful and cool as possible for you, the developers. In that spirit we will continue to provide new features, speed and stability as we move ahead.

Thanks to all of you for the awesome work you’ve done so far. We’ve got big plans for the Facebook Platform, and we hope you do too. Keep the great feedback coming, and happy hacking!