Facebook Developers

Developers, we welcome your feedback on a new direction we're thinking with how we communicate with you.

Currently, we have this blog, which provides important announcements and is the "official voice" of Facebook Platform. We also have the Platform Status Feed, where we publish quick, often important announcements, on anything from the current Platform health to notable changes or reminders that the beta site is available for your testing.

Soon we're going to start expanding the scope of our communications with you. We think you'd like to hear from more of our engineers and other members of the Platform team, so we're going to start allowing our team to blog about Facebook on their personal blogs, in an unofficial capacity. An engineer might want to talk about a novel way of using Feed forms, for example, or you might want to hear more personal thoughts about the fbFund selection process. And for times like this, we want to surface this content on Facebook as well.

And this is where you come in. Would you want to read these blogs on a separate feed or as part of this developer blog? We'd love to hear what you think. Take a few seconds to respond to this poll.

Facebook and Digg have been working together quite a bit lately on integrating Facebook Connect into the Digg experience. In two short weeks we'll both be heading across the pond to London for the Future of Web Apps Expo put on by our good friends at Carsonified.

Future of Web Apps Expo is the premiere internet expo in Europe. This year we're excited to be bringing a full crew from both Facebook and Digg.

At the end of the day on October 10th, there will be a live filming of Diggnation with our friends from Revision3. And, directly following that, Facebook and Digg have teamed up to sponsor the FOWA Wrap Up Party. It should be a blast!

Special shout out to David Prager and the Revision3 team for putting this video together for us.

Looking forward to seeing everyone there!

The search to identify new talent and the next great applications on Facebook Platform is well under way! Thanks to everyone who submitted by the August 29th deadline. Round 1 is now closed with over 600 applications. That's several hundred videos, several hundred business plans and over 600 entrepreneurs creating the next generation of Facebook applications… all in less than four weeks!

Our team has been busy reviewing each submission and we're amazed and excited by what we've seen. We're blown away by the remarkable amount of creativity, dedication and hard work put into each application. The competition is intense!

Our team has put in countless hours over the weekend and past week reading business plans, watching elevator pitches, and trying out your applications. (We've had some good laughs as well, so thanks to all of you who added a little humor to your pitches!)

To learn more about the fbFund competition, you can fan the fbFund Page or visit the website. We look forward to announcing the winners very soon!

In the meantime, we encourage you to search, share, and enjoy many of the publicly available fbFund elevator pitches. We leave you with a few:

• GroupCard
• Socialfly
• RealGifts

Last week we announced that we were working on one last feature we were really excited about to make applications easier to find. We're referring to it as the applications menu, and you’ll soon be able to see in the lower left corner of the screen in the same bar where chat messages appear.

In the new applications menu, all of a user's bookmarks will appear and be easily accessible. In addition, up to six application icons will be shown to the right of the menu button. When a user is using your application, they will be able to easily identify and bookmark your application with just one click.

Feedback we received indicated that users were having trouble with the Applications link in the top menu. People weren't easily finding their way to their favorite applications. By moving this menu and displaying a few icons at the new location, users will always be able to find the applications they use, as well as easily bookmark their favorite applications or the ones they use the most.

One further note about icons. With the new profile design, your application icons appear on off-white backgrounds. We strongly recommend that, if you're not already doing so, you use transparent GIFs for your icons. For most applications, this should be as easy as adding transparency to the edges of the icon.

As always, keep sending us your feedback in the Developer Forum.

Over these past few weeks and months you've been able to see how your applications work on the new profile and how users are integrating them into their profiles. Over 30 million people have checked out the new profile, and many are using it as their profile full time. We're nearing the time where we'll switch over remaining users by default. We expect most of this to take place over the next week.

We're excited by the feedback we've received from users and developers. We're especially excited by the ways in which your applications are integrating the new features and experiences.

Based on some of this feedback, we're working on one more interesting feature to help make your applications more easily accessible to your users. We'll provide more details as we finalize the design, but it won't require any changes on your end.

Throughout the next week, we'll actively migrate all our users to the new profile. This will happen by default rather than on an opt-in basis. Shortly thereafter, the old Facebook profile will no longer be available to anyone.

Finally, one week after all users are on the new profile and all session migration changes will be complete, the new session key model will take effect for your applications.

Please continue to send us any feedback and share your thoughts with the community in the Developer forum.

Based on developer requests for greater flexibility and for better performance, we've added a number of new features for iframe canvas pages that provide them with much of the functionality previously available only to FBML-based applications. These features include:

• Using XFBML, our extension to FBML that allows iframe-based application to use FBML tags.
• The availability of cached friend lists and preload FQL data to the JavaScript client library.
• The ability to preload FQL queries, just like FBML-based applications have been able to do.

You can now use FBML tags on iframe canvas pages with XFBML. Many tags, like fb:name and fb:profile-pic, you can incorporate directly into your iframe's HTML. Other important tags, like fb:request-form, you can use within the fb:serverfbml tag, letting you incorporate multi-friend selectors and request forms right into your iframe. If you're trying out Facebook Connect, you might already be familiar with XFBML, and now these same features are available for all iframe applications.

You can access friend lists faster using the standard JavaScript client library's FB.Facebook.apiClient.friends_get(callback) call. This call detects if the data is already rendered on a canvas page, avoiding a server request and loading the data instantly through the cross-domain communication channel. Any preloaded FQL data requested with the REST API admin.setAppProperties call is also rendered on canvas pages and can be accessed via the JavaScript client library's FB.Facebook.apiClient.preloadFQL_get(callback) call, which gets the data in the same way. The argument passed to callback is an associative array with requested rule names as keys and JSON-encoded query results as values.

In addition to the JavaScript client library changes, iframe applications that want to preload FQL queries will receive the data along with other parameters via POST with the prefix 'fb_post_sig’. We’re using a different prefix from the original 'fb_sig' prefix so we can avoid namespace collisions with the GET parameters, which will continue to use 'fb_sig' for compatibility with current applications which may be expecting the data. These parameters can be accessed and validated in the same method as the old parameters (for the PHP client, use get_valid_fb_params with the new fb_post_sig prefix).

The PHP client library has been updated to combine the new parameters so they can be accessed as part of the fb_params.

We hope that this new functionality will assist developers in creating faster applications for a better user experience. Please send us any feedback and share your thoughts with the community in the Developer forum.