Facebook Developers

We wanted to take a moment and thank you for all of your great work and amazing applications that have helped make Facebook Platform the largest and fastest-growing social platform over the past year and a half. As we end 2008 there are over 660,000 of you worldwide building applications that give users more powerful ways to share and connect, and collectively your applications have reached nearly 140 million people.

Just recently, we've been excited to bring you Facebook Connect - allowing you to integrate the tools and features of Facebook Platform on your websites, devices and desktop applications. In the next several months, we're looking forward to introducing additional improvements to help users more easily find your applications as well as launching the first sets of Verified Applications to users. If you haven't applied for verification yet, apply here.

Over the next year, we look forward to continued developments to improve Facebook Platform and help you reach and engage more users, and grow and sustain your business. We would love your feedback and input on what you think is most important - please take a few minutes and answer our survey here:

Facebook Developer Survey

From all of us at Facebook, we wish you and your families "Happy Holidays," and we look forward to making the web even more social with you in 2009!

Invitations are one of the best ways for users to share applications they love with their friends. Many developers have told us that this is one of the biggest ways in which their applications reach new users and grow usage.

Tonight we're introducing a new feature to make it even easier for users to share applications with all their friends, including those who may not be Facebook users already. In the friend selector as shown below, we've added a new link for users to invite friends who aren't on Facebook. Any invitations sent through this flow are not counted towards allocation limits. To simplify this page for users, we have also consolidated the tabs and different views of friend lists and networks into a dropdown menu.

When a user invites friends who aren't on Facebook, a special email is sent which invites the recipient to the application and become friends with the sender. When the recipient accepts the invite, they are taken to a special Express Registration page to sign up quickly for Facebook and to the application. Once that user joins, they automatically will have the application bookmarked and the application will be promoted on the new user's home page.

Please note that this feature is available with the fb:request-form of multi friend selector for sending invitations. This feature currently applies to invitations only, not requests. (invite=true with fb:request-form)

We hope you'll enjoy this feature and that it brings lot more friends to your applications.

Since we released the new profile design, we’ve heard a lot of positive feedback on the new experience, as well as a lot of feedback on how we could improve application discoverability and bookmarking. We’ve been running several tests to validate feature suggestions that may make it easier for users to find and use their applications.

Today we are adding a section for recently used applications to the top of the Application Menu. This section will help users find applications that they have used but not yet bookmarked. We’ve tested different versions of this feature over time and found users to be more responsive to this iteration than to earlier versions.

Looking ahead, we're always improving the user experience of the profile, and are working on other new features that may either enhance or replace this one if we find they more effectively help users discover and interact with your applications. As always, if you have feedback about the changes to the Applications Menu, send it to us on the Developer Forum.

We opened Facebook Connect less than two weeks ago and have been excited to see over 80 sites go live. In addition to a variety of sites and several leading publications, you'll see that many major blogs have implemented Facebook Connect, such as TechCrunch, Inside Facebook, and Gawker.com.

Today we're announcing the Facebook Connect Plugin Directory to help all developers and bloggers find plugins to easily integrate Facebook Connect into their sites and blogs. We invite you, our development community, to create, list, and offer or sell your own plugins through this directory.

As we announced on stage at our f8 conference in July, Six Apart has built and released an Open Source plugin which allows any Facebook user to sign in, comment, and share their actions using Facebook Connect on any Movable Type powered site. This plugin runs on Movable Type 4.2 and is integrated into the upcoming release of Motion, a new free social application designed to power interactive communities that connect with the rest of the Web.

In addition to Six Apart, we're excited to see many other developers in the community start projects to bring Facebook Connect to blogs and other publishing systems, including WordPress, MediaWiki, Drupal, and more. In the plugin directory today, you can find integrations for:

• Movable Type - Six Apart has built an Open Source plugin which adds Facebook Connect to any Movable Type powered site and allows any Facebook user to sign in, comment and share their actions on Facebook
• WordPress - Sociable has built an Open Source WordPress plugin to add Facebook Connect to your WordPress blog and offer community features including showing recent visitors, inviting friends and sharing comments with friends on Facebook
• WordPress - Adam Hupp built an Open Source WordPress plugin to easily integrate Facebook Connect into your blog for login and commenting. This is now available for open-source and we look forward to your improvements
• Disqus - Disqus integrated Facebook Connect into their commenting features
• MediaWiki - Garrett Brown started an experimental MediaWiki extension to incorporate Facebook Connect login and identity into your MediaWiki site

It's still early but we're hearing that some blogs have seen an almost 2x increase in comments, and many have also sensed an increase in the quality of dialogue, as more commenters are using their real names and pictures.

We're excited about the community of developers using Facebook Connect already, and look forward to all of the new tools to help make integrating Facebook Connect into your site even easier. For plugin developers, we've offered some new documentation. As always, stay tuned for more.

As Facebook continues to expand internationally, our Facebook Developer Garage program does as well. More than half of our Garages, which serve as a forum to share ideas with local developers, have been international and the program is growing fast. In the last year, we’ve seen over 55 Garages in over 35 unique locations.

Since Facebook Platform launched in 2007, more than 17,000 developers have attended Facebook Developer Garages worldwide, and we hope to see even more of you in the future. We’ve reached developers from Tokyo to Toronto, as well as in our hometown of Palo Alto. Most recently Facebook developers met in Paris during the Le Web conference, as well as in Accra, Ghana and Kampala, Uganda.

Last week, Sasha Rush, one of Facebook's lead Platform Engineers, kicked off the first Facebook Developer Garage in West Africa in the country of Ghana. He spoke to over 85 developers about building on Facebook Platform.

Platform Engineer, Sasha Rush, with the Ghanian developers

Last Tuesday, Dave Morin, Senior Platform Product Manager, and Nick Bushak, an intern on the Platform team, lead a special-edition Developer Garage at the Le Web Conference in Paris. Our French affiliates joined us, with sessions on Facebook Connect, the games space on Facebook, and other technical topics.

Thomas Guenoux of KDRS sharing his technical knowledge of the benefits of building on Platform using FBML or iFrames

To wrap up 2008, Charlie Cheever, Platform Engineering Manager, finished our African tour at the Facebook Developer Garage Uganda; teaching over 100 developers to use their coding skills to build Facebook applications as well as provide users with engaging and meaningful experiences.

Ugandan developers learn to code for Facebook Platform

If you’d like to learn more about the Facebook Developer Garage program, check out the Developer Wiki to find out where the next Garage is taking place, or how to host one yourself. We’ll be adding much more information in the new year.

We hope to see you at a Facebook Developer Garage in 2009!

*Special thanks to Samasource, Meltwater Entrepreneurial School of Technology (MEST), and AppAfrica for hosting our African Garages.

We've had an incredible week watching the Web become more social and authentic as sites are get started with Facebook Connect. Just today CNET launched their implementation of Facebook Connect, enabling users to comment with their real identity on all of CNET's properties. And there are more exciting things in store for commenters and bloggers alike in the days to come.

Now, across dozens of sites developers have implemented ways for users to:

• Share class notes and ratings of professors on Koofers
• Share eco-friendly tips with like-minded people on Huddler
• Watch and comment on videos on Vimeo
• Share information for events planned at sites like Eventbrite and Acteva
  
• Access sheet music at Cantorion
  
• Take fun quizzes with Brainfall
  
• Easily join alumni networks for schools like Oregon State University (by iModules)

Check out the full list of live sites on our Developer Wiki, and add yours as you go live.

The word is spreading. Earlier this week more than 250 developers attended the Paris Facebook Developer Garage at Le Web featuring content around Facebook Connect, including exciting developments from Netvibes. And, last night we saw more than 100 people attend the Bay Area Facebook Meetup (this event is not managed by Facebook) to learn more about Facebook Connect. During one presentation GovIt shared insights about their implementation, including that 58% of their new users sign up through Facebook Connect. Since implementing Connect, GovIt has seen overall engagement and registration rates double, according to GovIt's Taylor Norrish.

Things are abuzz in the halls of Facebook as we watch you make it easier for the 130 million Facebook users to share and connect with content on your sites. We're already hard at work on the next set of features, so stay tuned!

To help you get started with Facebook Connect on your website, fellow Facebook engineer Luke Shepard and I prepared a video to show you how to add Facebook Connect to your blog in just a few minutes. You can watch it here or see it full size.

We have had a great time this week in Paris at the Le Web Conference and had the chance to meet with industry leaders from all over Europe to talk and discuss the future of a more social Web through Facebook Connect.

On Wednesday - onsite at Le Web - we hosted the Facebook Developer Garage Paris with 5 different sessions covering how to make your website or application more social. We were excited to see the room completely packed with over 500 total attendees.

We also had the opportunity to participate in a panel alongside of our colleagues from Google, Microsoft, Myspace, and Six Apart discussing the future of the social Web called "Platform Love: Getting Along" moderated by Marc Canter. We had a chance to discuss our vision for making the Web more social by giving users and developers the power to share and make the world more open and connected. Le Web graciously captured video of the panel.

Check it out here:

Online video chat by Ustream

Here's to a more social Web and a happy holiday season to our developers worldwide. Special thanks to Geraldine & Loïc Le Meur for hosting such a wonderful event. See you in Paris next year!

Last night, we hosted our first fbFund Demo Day at Facebook Headquarters in Palo Alto, California. The twenty-five Round 2 fbFund recipients flew in from as far as the UK and Canada at their own expense, to share their businesses with investors, press, Facebook employees, and other business/tech luminaries. It was a great opportunity to connect with and get inspired by the talented entrepreneurs building meaningful businesses using Facebook Platform.

Mark Zuckerberg checking out Social Arcade at Demo Day

During the event, we announced the top 5 fbFund recipients from this funding cycle. Final judging took into account over 180,000 user votes, as well as input from Facebook, Accel Partners and Founders Fund. Congratulations again to the grand prize recipients, each of whom received $250,000 in funding: GroupCard, MouseHunt, Weddingbook, Wildfire, and Kontagent.

GroupCard team members, Bob Ralian and John Anderson

MouseHunt team members, Joel Auge and Bryan Freeman

Weddingbook team members, Christian Leskowsky and Kevin Lister

Wildfire team members, Alain Chuard and Victoria Ransom

Kontagent team members, Fredric Newberg and Jeff Tseng

Check out more photos from the event here.

Interested in Applying for the Next fbFund Round?

Together with Founders Fund and Accel Partners, fbFund is a $10 million seed fund that has helped provide funding and mentoring resources to numerous recipients, and we're just getting started. Please become a fan of the fbFund Page and stay tuned for updates in Q1 2009 on how to apply.

We're excited to announce today the general availability of Facebook Connect, the next evolution of Facebook Platform. Since May 2007, Platform has rapidly evolved from 100 early ideas to over 52,000 applications with 14 billion page views per month. Over 70% of Facebook users actively use at least one application per month, and over 4,200 applications have more than 10,000 users per month. All of these applications have been built using Platform’s core services. These services allow users to use their profile in applications, easily find their friends, and share information and experiences with their friends through Feed, requests, and more.

With Facebook Connect, you can take the same Platform features and tools that you’ve used to grow your applications successfully, and integrate them into your own website. Key features that you can now bring to your own website include:

• Trusted authentication: Offer Facebook users the option to log in to your site with one click.
• Real identity: Integrate your users’ Facebook identities into your site.
• Friend linking: Let your connected users find their Facebook friends on your site.
• Dynamic privacy: Enable users to bring their information and privacy settings with them to your site.
• Social distribution: Allow users to share actions and information from your site with their friends on Facebook including publishing Feed stories to profiles and sending requests.

In short, Facebook Connect lets users log in to a site using their Facebook account, bring their profile with them, easily find friends also using the website, and share information and experiences using the same features as they would on a Facebook application. Pretty much every feature that you can build with an application on Facebook can be offered through Facebook Connect.

We've seen early and great results already with sites using Facebook Connect. Many sites are already live, including Citysearch (share reviews with your friends), TechCrunch (use your Facebook account to post comments), vLane (shop for cars with your friends input), and Howcast (comment and share how-to videos). These are just a sampling of the many sites that launched during our beta period. Early results have been very positive: as many as 2/3 of users registering for the sites are doing so with their Facebook accounts and taking as much as 50% more actions on the sites.

Now it's your turn to make your website more social with Facebook Connect. So check out our documentation and our sample site, The Run Around, and start Connecting!

P.S. To all of those great developers who applied during our beta period, we apologize for any delays in getting back to you. Feel free to launch now!

Last week we headed over to India to kick off a series of all-new Facebook Developer Garage events. This coming week we are heading over to Europe's premiere internet conference, Le Web. Last year, Le Web attracted participants from over 40 countries. This year Le Web boasts over 1500 participants from all parts of the world, including speakers such as Paulo Coelho author of "The Alchemist".

We're excited to be participating in Le Web and to be speaking alongside of many luminaries in the web world. The theme this year is "Love, for a healthy dose of optimism." At Facebook we are optimistic about the future of a more open and connected world.

This year, we've partnered with Le Web to offer you both great content and a great experience with 3 different Facebook experiences where you can hear about the newest innovations on Facebook Platform, such as Facebook Connect, and do a deep dive into how to create great applications for the social web:

Wednesday, December 10th, 2008 - 9:00AM
Platform Love: Getting Along Panel
Senior Platform Manager, Dave Morin

Wednesday, December 10th, 2008 - 1:00PM
>Facebook Developer Garage - Paris

Schedule
1-1:50 Introduction to Facebook Platform (Dave Morin, Senior Platform Manager, Facebook)
2-2:50 Facebook Connect: Building your Integration (Franck Mahon, Netvibes)
3-3:50 The Games Space on Facebook (Mathieu Nouzareth, President & CEO, Cafe.com/Boonty)
4-4:50 Building your Facebook App: Integrating in the New Design with FBML or iframes (KRDS)
5-5:50 Metrics on Facebook: Leveraging Metrics to build on Platform (Nick Bushak, Facebook Platform Intern)

Wednesday, December 10th, 2008 - 10:00PM
LeWeb'08 Closing Party with TechCrunch and Facebook

We hope to see you there!

And, if you'd like to meet up during the event to discuss making your site or application more social through Facebook Platform or Facebook Connect, drop me a line on Facebook or follow me on Twitter (@davemorin). I would LOVE to chat about the future of the social web with you.

We’re excited that developers from all over the world are building on Facebook, and thrilled when we have the opportunity to meet them. This past weekend I spoke at the first ever Facebook Developer Garage in India hosted by Tekriti Software in New Delhi. (Gurgaon, to be precise.) We started the day with an overview of Facebook, including developments since the Platform's launch in mid 2007, updates on some of our recent announcements (including our partnership with Salesforce and the Application Verification Program), and we talked at length about Facebook Connect.

After my talk, we listened to developers share their experiences with Platform. Infrablue Technology, creator of Twenty20 Cricket (one of our FbFundees), shared their experiences creating one of the first fantasy applications on Facebook focused entirely on cricket. Then Vikas Jawa from Zoomtra (an Indian travel brand) shared his key learnings from creating their app, India Dekha. India Dekha allows users to share all of the places in India where they have traveled, would like to travel, or would like to highlight. He shared great insights, such as: "know what you want – for us, it was branding and to help generate user-generated content" and "find reasons for users to come back – make it engaging."

Throughout the rest of the day we heard from developers creating multi-platform experiences, as well as giving each other technical advice, for example, the benefits of delaying require_login() for users (it allows them to see much more of an app before having to share their own data and click "allow.")

The enthusiasm in the air was palpable, and the organizers have already been asked to host more garages in Delhi. Some of the attendees are excited to host their own garage in Bangladesh early in the new year.

For me, it was a fantastic opportunity to see the similarities and differences between our developers around the world. Infrastructure is clearly an issue in India (we had three power outages during the garage alone!) but all developers worldwide want to better understand ways to make more engaging and compelling apps.

Hats off to Tekriti Software for a job well done – I can’t wait to meet the next generation of developers at a garage somewhere else in the world... maybe your home town?

We're always looking for ways to make developing Facebook Platform applications easier for you. Today we want to show you how we're improving the way you configure your application settings.

The application settings editor in the Developer application started off as a long list of fields. As we expanded the capabilities of Platform, adding new features such as Facebook Pages, profile tabs, the Publisher, and Facebook Connect, the editor became a bit more complex and unwieldy. We've heard from many developers, novice and veteran alike, that the editor could be made more user-friendly.

We've redesigned the application settings editor to help you create and configure your applications much more easily. We're launching it soon, and you'll be able to switch back and forth between the old and new editors for a period of time, much like how users could switch between the old and new profiles earlier this year.

Some new features include:

• Grouping similar features together under relevant tabs and headings.
• Simplifying the settings for who can use your application (Users and Facebook Pages each have one check box; there is no longer an option to limit Pages use to specific categories).
• Renaming Developer Mode to Sandbox Mode.

Check out the preview of the Advanced tab of the new editor:

In the near future, we'll extend the new editor with more tabs for other features, such as Feed, the data store API, and translations. Keep an eye out on this blog and the Platform Status Feed for announcements.

If you have any feedback about the new editor, let us know in the Developer Forum.