Facebook Developers

One of our biggest goals this year is to continue improving our communication with you, our awesome developer community. One way we hope to do this is by creating a monthly roundup all of the announcements, new features, and updates to Facebook Platform that occurred over the past month.

Here's a summary of the major Facebook Platform news from January, 2009.

New Features

• Extend FBML with custom tags. Check out the custom tags directory to find tags to add to your application.
• FBJS has been improved to FBJS2. FBJS2 is now available in a preview version, and we'll start migrating to our new version over the coming weeks, pending your feedback.

Updates

• Improving application insights. We now count tab views toward your applications' active users. The count occurs on the initial page load of the profile, in addition to a user explicitly clicking the tab.
• You should always store UIDs as 64-bit ints; album IDs and photo IDs are now strings with a maximum length of 50 characters.
• Applications now receive the fb_sig_app_id parameter in requests Facebook sends to your domains. It will be part of the signature calculation.
• The visible field in photos.getAlbums lets your app know who can see an album.
• Starting February 9, 2009, we'll stop passing the ext_send_ss parameter to iframes included in your application that are not within the domain or subdomain of the applications’ callback URLs. If you're relying on this functionality, please make sure you find alternate ways to share the information that utilizes this method. We are making this change to make iframes rendered by fb:iframe more consistent with existing cookie and cross-domain security models.
• You must include the {*target*} token in the MultiFeedStory form template.
• On March 3, 2009, we're deprecating our Marketplace APIs, which will no longer be available.

Announcements

• Welcome to our new Facebook Platform leadership.
• Apple released their iPhoto Facebook Connect integration.

Articles/Videos

• Facebook Connect developers, watch a video demonstrating how to integrate social actions users take on your site into Facebook Feed.

Keep an eye on this blog (or subscribe to the RSS feed), the Platform Status Feed (or subscribe to its RSS feed), and the weekly Push Changes articles for announcements, changes, and other important bulletins.

As always, we appreciate your continued feedback in our Developer Forum -- let us know how we can reach and communicate with you even better.

Today we are announcing a preview of a major update to FBJS. We're calling this FBJS2. We've completely rewritten FBJS from the ground-up to make it much more natural for Javascript developers - now you will be able to use more standard Javascript syntax and no longer be required to use proprietary function-based getters and setters. With FBJS2, old FBJS-specific code such as this.setStyle('display', 'block') can now be written with portable JavaScript as this.style.display = 'block', for example.

We expect all of your original FBJS code to continue to work with the new FBJS2 libraries. We've created a new layer that implements all the original interfaces of FBJS under the context of FBJS2. If you are currently using FBJS, you should not need to make any changes to your applications to support this release. However, we still encourage you to port your applications to FBJS2 once it goes live to simplify your development using more standard Javascript syntax and for future benefits.

In the next 4-6 weeks, we plan to release FBJS2 to the live site, pending the feedback we receive. Once FBJS2 is live, it will replace the current version of FBJS. Again, you don't have to change your code at all, but we want you to make sure everything you have works correctly with the new version (i.e. we haven't broken anything standard or non-standard that used to work). We have done rigorous testing on this already, but we strongly encourage you to test your applications in the FBJS2 sandbox as well to ensure that they will continue to work and highlight any bugs to us.

To view the sandbox, visit http://www.fbjs.facebook.com. Simply go to your application and it will be running under FBJS2.

Please submit all bugs to the FBJS2 category at http://bugs.developers.facebook.com. Please share your thoughts, questions and feedback in our FBJS Forums.

At Facebook, we think that photos are one of the most powerful ways to connect and share with friends. Since 2005, Facebook Photos has given users a chance to share rich experiences with their friends who are on and off Facebook. Users upload and share over 700 million photos on Facebook each month.

We are excited that sharing your photos with the people you care about has become even easier with iLife ’09, Apple’s new suite of applications that includes iPhoto ’09. Users of iPhoto ’09 can easily share and tag photos from iPhoto directly to Facebook. With help from Facebook Connect, photo tags from iPhoto ’09 can be added to Facebook and generate Facebook notifications. Additionally, Mac users can update Facebook News Feed and alert friends anytime they update their websites using Apple’s iWeb ’09 application.

As we at Facebook work to make applications everywhere more social, desktop and mobile applications are integral parts for making the world a more connected place. The upcoming launch of Facebook Connect for Mobile and desktop implementations of Facebook Connect with software from other companies like Xobni are just some of the exciting ways the Facebook experience and power of the social graph are accessible to users both on and off the site.

We think this is just the tip of the iceberg. Over time the desktop will become more social and our friends will be with us to connect and share in more powerful ways. We look forward to seeing more photos than ever on Facebook.

Speaking at a Facebook Developer Garage is a fantastic opportunity for us at Facebook to connect with our developer community all over the world. At these Garages we can listen and learn firsthand how we can continue to make Facebook Platform even better, and how together we can continue to make the Web more social.

The timing of the Garage was perfect since Nana10.co.il, one of the leading Israeli portals, just launched their Facebook Connect integration. I was excited to share some details on many of the programs we announced and launched in the last few months including Facebook Connect, winners of our fbFund competition, our Application Verification Program, and our new partnership with Salesforce. We were also thrilled to have leading entrepreneurs Eyal Magen of Gigya and Alon Carmel of Devunity speak about their products and integrations with Facebook and the social Web.

The excitement and the enthusiasm for Facebook Platform was phenomenal, with over 200 developers, entrepreneurs, and local media professionals attending the event.

For me, this was a great opportunity to connect with Israeli developers and to be able to give something back to my homeland and the Israeli Internet community. Israel might be a small country, but Israeli developers and entrepreneurs are everywhere. Rumor has it another Facebook Developer Garage Israel is already in the works. We hope to see you at the next one!

Special thanks to Alon Carmel from Devunity, Yaron Orenstein from the Co.il's, Orly Yakuel and Benchmark Capital's Michael Eisenberg for making this Garage possible.

Hey Everyone --

This is going to be an intense year for Facebook, and it's also going to be a big year for what we do with Facebook Connect and Platform. Our goal is to help people share information and connect with the people they know all over the Web. Our strategy is to become the most effective way for every developer or publisher to spread their site and create engagement. Right now there are already more than a thousand sites using Connect, and by the end of the year that number should approach the number of Platform applications.

In order to build on this momentum, we're making some changes and moving some of Facebook’s people into new roles.

Mike Vernal will be taking over as the new manager of the Connect and Platform engineering teams. Mike was critical in building and launching Connect and thinking through the new problems we're going to face as it grows. Charlie Cheever did an excellent job launching Platform and leading the team for the past year and a half, and now he's going to lead more new initiatives for us. Charlie will be moving into a new role as an engineering manager where he'll be fo cused on building some of our new products and ways for people to share information.

Ethan Beard will become the director of Platform Marketing, moving over from his current role in business development. Ethan has been one of the stars at Facebook for his work in many areas, most recently getting developers to adopt Connect. His background includes experience in product management as well as some engineering at his own company. I've asked Elliot Schrage, who was managing the team and leading our search for a new director, to take on other marketing responsibilities within the company.

Ruchi Sanghvi will remain the product manager for the Platform team. This isn't a change -- and she's doing a great job -- but I wanted to call out this role since product management is the third leg in the engineering-product management-product marketing team.

I'm excited about our Connect and Platform strategy for 2009 and these new leadership roles. As you have the chance to work with Ethan, Mike and Ruchi and see the results of their work, I’m sure you will be, too.

Mark

When we released Facebook Platform in 2007 to our developer community, our goal was to enable you to build great social applications that are integrated with Facebook. FBML was one Platform component that provided a simple and powerful way to add social context to your Facebook applications. FBML also lowered the amount of effort involved in building applications by providing useful tags and user interface components that addressed the needs of many developers.

Initially, FBML included only tags that Facebook created. Today, we're excited to announce a new feature called custom tags. With custom tags, any developer can create new FBML tags. Developers can use these tags in their own applications, or they can share their custom tags with the entire Facebook developer community as pre-built FBML components.

So if you're an application developer and want to make your application even more content rich -- say by including music or news -- consider using an available custom tag set. For example, if you're building a wedding site and want to include a playlist of top wedding songs, you can use the iLike custom tag to embed a playlist of top wedding songs. See below for more information about iLike's custom tags and other examples.

If you've built an application with a lot of rich content, and you want to extend its reach and share that content with other Platform applications, create some custom tags and share this content with the community. Custom tags are easy to use and are a great way for you to extend your application's distribution. Say you have a video sharing application. You could create a video tag that renders a video player for a specific video, or a top-videos tag that renders a list of today's most popular videos. Other applications could easily embed this content and thereby expose it to users in new ways.

Another powerful benefit of custom tags is that you can use them to improve your application's performance. Much like how one FBML tag is a shorthand way to include a lot of markup (think of fb:comments, for example), one custom tag can replace a lot of FBML and HTML content inline. Using custom tags in this way lowers the communication overhead between Facebook and your application's servers. One custom tag can render a larger amount of content. Instead of sending the full FBML fragment with every request, you can replace it with a custom tag that Facebook will expand when Facebook parses the page.

We created a custom tags directory on the Developer wiki where you can find documentation on public (shared) tags created by other developers. If you've created new public tags, let the community know by adding their documentation to this wiki article.

Here are some great examples that are already live. You can quickly and easily embed them in your application:

• iLike offers tags that let you display favorite songs and playlists, complete with controls to listen, dedicate, watch, and make ringtones of those songs.
• Causes offers custom tags that let you show your support for your favorite causes by displaying badges that invite users to join and support the cause.
• Graffiti offers tags that let you draw and display graffiti.
• Visual Bookshelf offers tags that show the most popular books by category.

You can read more about custom tags on the Developer wiki.

At this time, you can't render custom tags with fb:serverfbml, for use with iframe applications or Facebook Connect sites. We'll support custom tags in XFBML soon.

As always, please send us your comments and feedback about custom tags in the FBML section of the Developer Forum.

Our JSON parsing engine will change slightly on the 20th of January. This affects you ONLY if you use FBJSAjax with the JSON responseType, and your application emits JSON which does not conform to the JSON specification but which we currently parse anyway. (Even in this case, it is unlikely you are affected.)

More detail (including a test console) is available in this post on the developer forum.

Integrating Facebook Connect into your website to add social context is a quick and easy development process involving a few key features. In the first video in our Facebook Connect series we showed you how to add Facebook Connect authentication and identity into your site in 8 minutes.

In this video, engineers from the Facebook Connect team - Ronnie Cheng and Luke Shepard - show you how to give your users the power to share through Facebook Connect by integrating social distribution to Facebook Feed. In 10 minutes, we walk you step by step through adding publishing to Feed, creating Feed templates and bundles, and designing Feed stories for the best user experience.

You can view the video full size. And be sure to check out full documentation on how to integration Facebook Feed as a part of Facebook Connect.

Happy New Year and here's to a more social Web!