Facebook Developers

We're putting the final touches on Facebook Connect as we speak. And, we'd like to welcome you to come learn, share, and "connect" with us at the Facebook Developer Garage Palo Alto - Connect Edition.

With Facebook Connect you can enable your users to seamlessly connect their real identity to your site, easily find their friends who already use your site, and allow them to share information and actions back to their friends on Facebook.

The Facebook Connect team will share the Connect vision, demonstrate real-world implementations, and give some quick tips on how to integrate Connect into your site. And, Facebook Engineers will be there too to help you get started on incorporating Facebook Connect into your site.

Facebook Developer Garage Palo Alto - Details

• What: Learn more about Facebook Connect and build your own
• When: Wednesday, September 3rd
• Time: 6:30 PM- Midnight
• Where: Blue Chalk Café - Palo Alto

For more information and to RSVP please go to our Facebook event.

To learn more about Facebook Connect, please check out our Facebook Connect Page.

Facebook Connect is still in limited beta testing and we're excited by the implementations we’re seeing from several of our launch participants. Users can expect to see some beta implementations go live in the next few weeks, and an expanded beta program that is open to all developers and users will be rolled out later in September.

Join us as we work together to make the Web more social.

We have seen an increasing number of complex cases where certain applications and certain content may be appropriate or available to specific audiences and users, but not to others. For example, you may license some content (video, movies, games, etc.) that you can only make available to users in certain regions, such as U.S. and Canada but not to the rest of the world. Or you may have an application where you want to limit the entire experience to a certain age group such as teenagers, or people of legal drinking age.

Today we're launching new API methods and an FBML tag as part of a new feature called "Demographic Restrictions" that will allow you to restrict your entire application or specific content within your application to certain demographic groups of users by age or by location. We hope this feature will help ensure users are presented with safe and relevant content while giving you more flexibility to innovate and build your business.

When you restrict your entire application to a specific demographic group (using the admin.setRestrictionInfo method), your application won't:

• Appear to any users who are restricted from seeing your application. These users cannot access your canvas pages.
• Appear in search results when a restricted user searches for it.
• Be able to send any requests or notifications or publish Feed stories to restricted users.

For example, if you have licensed a game for U.S. and Canada users only, you can use this method to restrict the application to those countries only, and it will simply not appear to users in the rest of the world.

If you have specific content you want to restrict, but want to keep your application generally visible to all users, you can use the fb:restricted-to tag to restrict the audience for that specific content. This tag ensures that the content will appear only to users who should view it.

Our restriction technology is based on a combination of what information a user has entered and verified on Facebook as well as IP targeting for location. You must use this technology whenever Facebook policies require it (more on that below), but you can and should consider implementing additional consent or confirmation in your application as appropriate. For example, if for legal reasons your application requires the user to affirm that they are of a certain age or are in a certain location, you should continue to solicit that explicit affirmation, and not regard the fact that the user passed through the Demographic Restrictions as equivalent.

Please read the Demographic Restrictions wiki article for more details.

Policy Update

With this announcement, we are in the process of revising our Platform Application Guidelines that currently restrict applications promoting content such as sale of alcohol. We plan to modify this policy to permit promotion of content around the sale of alcohol, provided that you specifically use the Demographic Restrictions feature to restrict your application or content to users of appropriate legal age.

Starting today, we are beta-testing this technology and policy change with a very limited set of companies. We plan for this policy change to take effect officially before the end of September, based on a successful beta period and rollout. If there are any changes or updates to this plan and timing, we will inform you quickly.

For any confidential questions or matters, please write us at developers-help@facebook.com. Otherwise please use the Developer Forum, where we'll be participating and the whole community can join in the conversation.

We’ve just released some changes to the API that allow your applications to integrate with Facebook's Events application. These new API calls allow applications to create, modify, and cancel events, as well as submit a user's RSVP to any event that the application created.

With an active session and the appropriate extended permissions, your application can manage your users' schedules for any events created through your application. These events appear on their profiles alongside all their other events, so they can easily keep track of what's coming up as well as invite more friends. Applications that could take advantage of this include those that manage personal events and those that host events. We're sure you'll come up with a lot more ideas!

For applications that already have events associated with them, like concert or class applications, now you can easily create and manage events that appear on Facebook, and your users can easily RSVP to these events from within the application. Stories about these events appear in the News Feeds of the friends of the attendee, and the person attending can invite  more friends after RSVPing.  In this case, you won't need an active session to create events, since they're associated with the application, and not the user. However, you'll still need an extended permission and active session so a user can RSVP to these events.

We updated events.get and events.getMembers to include this sessionless use case; they will return events created by the application without a session.

Let us know what you think. You can leave comments or ask questions in the Developer forum.

In response to your requests for more ways to better understand and visualize the performance of your applications on Facebook, today we are introducing a whole new set of metrics you can use to monitor user actions for your applications.

In the Insights area for your application, we’re adding a new Features tab to highlight aggregated statistics on user actions around specific features on Facebook. This tab displays total counts for user actions including canvas page views, clicks on profile boxes, confirmation of Feed forms, and, the adding and removing of bookmarks. To help you track trends in the data, a graph will show daily counts for the metrics and you can generate statistics for a specified date range.

We hope that this new tab will be a good start to help you visualize application growth, gauge user response, and ultimately build a better user experience. And, we expect these metrics to complement and help augment the great tools and analytics already provided by service providers in the Facebook ecosystem and to serve as foundational pieces of new, more powerful analytics tools for developers.

You can send us your feedback and ask questions in the Developer Forum.

We've heard many of your ideas on improving the ways we help users find applications that are engaging and useful to them. Some recent changes to the Application Directory are some early steps to incorporate your feedback.

First, we're rating engagement by the number of monthly active users instead of the number of daily active users. As we mentioned when we launched new metrics in June, we've evolved our application statistics to better surface relevant applications to users over time. When Platform first launched, you could see applications ranked by total number of installs. This was helpful to see which applications users had tried, but not necessarily those actually being used. To address this, we moved to ranking by daily active users. This metric emphasizes applications that are used daily over other valuable applications that don't naturally attract users back every day. For example, a movie application might be something users only visit on the weekends. Or a rent splitting application may only be used by roommates once each month.

To help you focus on building longer-term engagement, we're showing you the number of users who visit your application over a longer timeframe than just one day. This is available on your statistics page and via the application.getPublicInfo API call. In the Application Directory, we are also starting to rank by monthly active users and have removed the active users as a percentage of total install user base statistic.

Second, we've been testing an application recommendation algorithm called "Applications You May Like" with a portion of users visiting the Application Directory. The applications presented to users are algorithmically generated based on many factors, including which applications a user's friends use and the applications that have engaged similar users. The suggested applications are not manually selected, and we're continually working to improve our algorithm with other useful signals.

We hope to continue to provide better ways for users to discover your applications, so you can focus on building experiences that users love and come back to as often as they need. We always want to hear from you. You can send us your feedback and ask questions in the Developer Forum.

During out f8 last conference last week, we were excited to release Facebook Connect to you, our developer community, so that you could start integrating Facebook Connect into your Web sites ahead of the broader launch to Facebook users.

For those of you who couldn't make f8, we wanted to share some of the details about the sandbox and invite you to start using Facebook Connect today.

To try out Facebook Connect, you can visit The Run Around, a sample site that the team built. The source code for the site is also available so that you can set it up for yourself and see how it works.

To learn more about the inner workings of Facebook Connect and how you can integrate it into your site, check out the overview and the documentation.

The Facebook Connect sandbox is open to the entire developer community. To start developing, create a new Facebook application and configure it to use the Facebook Connect sandbox (http://api.connect.facebook.com/).

If you have any questions or feedback as you use it, please visit our developer forums and let us know.

We're planning on releasing Facebook Connect to all Facebook users in the coming weeks. We'll keep you informed about the launch details on this blog and the developer wiki.

As part of the launch, we'd like to highlight some of the best integrations. If you have something you're really excited about and want to share it with the Connect team, please send us screenshots and URLs at connect@facebook.com.

Here's to making the Web a more social place.

Round 1 for the fbFund Developer Competition has begun! We are looking to fund talented developers and entrepreneurs with up to $250,000 non-recourse grants to build great applications on Facebook Platform.

In Round 1, the top 25 applicants will each earn $25,000 and have the opportunity to apply for Round 2, where the top 5 applications will each earn $250,000. We are seeking applications that best embody our guiding principles for social applications and have the potential to become Great Apps. In addition, applications should meet the fbFund criteria highlighted here:

• Originality of Concept: Does the application introduce a great idea in a new and unexplored area?
• Market: Is this application targeted to key audiences or meet compelling market needs?
• Social/Useful: Does the application enable people to interact with each other? Does it deliver real value to users (including entertainment)?
• Expressive: Does the application allow people to share more information?
• Intuitive: Is the application compelling and easy to use? Does it have a well-thought-out user experience?
• Potential: Can it be a real business someday?
• Team: Do you believe this team can execute and is driven to succeed?

Check out this fun video that kicks off our competition:

Learn more about the competition requirements and apply on the fbFund website.

Applications are due August 29th, 2008.