Facebook Developers

As part of our ongoing effort to improve our communication with our developer community, we offer you our second monthly roundup of all the announcements, new features, and updates to Facebook Platform that occurred during February, 2009.

New Features

• We launched our first social widget for Facebook Connect, the Comments Box.
• We released many new APIs and FQL tables: for status, links, notes and video.
• We introduced the auth.revokeExtendedPermission API method and tweaked the admin.getAllocation method by adding an additional optional user parameter.

Updates

• We removed the dependency on Script# core JavaScript libraries.
• The fb:comments tag works on both canvas pages and in profile tabs. Also note that the uid passed to the tab link for FBML generation is the profile ID not the viewer ID.
• We standardized the format of arrays in the Platform API. Going forward, any new API method will take JSON-encoded arrays only.
• The new deadline for the additional restrictions on other content related to alcoholic beverages -- including unbranded, generic drink images -- is now March 6th, 2009.

Announcements

• We want your feedback on Facebook Principles and Statement of Rights and Responsibilities.
• We hosted the OpenID User Experience and Summit.

Articles/Videos

• How To: Create a Comments Box with Facebook Connect in 5 Minutes.
• We wrote new best practices for monetization.

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.

Beginning on March 2, Facebook users across the Web will have the opportunity to participate in DEMO 09 with Facebook's Live Feed technology, and comment on the latest class of companies selected to launch their new products on the DEMO stage.

Powered by Facebook Connect, the DEMO site will stream live content from the DEMObeat sessions alongside a feed of status updates from your friends and those watching around the Web. Users will also be able to update their Facebook statuses from the DEMO site and send updates back to Facebook. Tune into the broadcast beginning on Monday at 8:30 AM PST at http://www.demo.com/live.

For nearly twenty years, DEMO has been a launchpad for emerging innovation and earned a reputation for consistently identifying technologies that will disrupt current markets and invent industries. In addition to making the DEMO experience more social for those online, the event will also feature a Facebook Live Feed stream onsite at the DEMO ballroom in Palm Desert, CA.

Whether technology fans will be at the event or keeping up with it online, everyone is welcome to watch and comment on the DEMObeat sessions, which will be hosted by new Co-Executive Producer Matt Marshall, CEO of VentureBeat. I’ll be speaking on a panel that will tackle the issue of how social data sharing will change lives and business. This panel, as well as discussions around new tools achieving energy efficiency and productivity, will begin streaming live on Tuesday at 2:00 PM PST.

In less than three months since Facebook Connect launched, over 6,000 Websites have implemented the service. We're excited to see DEMO integrating with Facebook, and we look forward to compelling conversations around the top trends and latest topics in high technology.

Dave looks forward to seeing his friends at DEMO and on Facebook.

Earlier today, we announced a new approach for users around the world to play a meaningful role in determining the future policies governing Facebook. As important members of the Facebook community, we would like your feedback on two new proposed documents: the Facebook Principles, which defines your rights, and the Statement of Rights and Responsibilities, which will replace the Terms of Use and the Developer Terms of Service (as well as the Advertiser Terms and Conditions). These new documents will cover all use of Facebook, including use of Facebook Platform through such core features as Facebook Connect, canvas page applications, and Share.

We've created two groups to discuss these documents, and welcome your comments. For a deeper look into the philosophy behind this decision, please read Mark Zuckerberg's blog post. Comments will be accepted in each group for 30 days, closing at 12:01 AM Pacific time on March 29. You can find these groups here:

• Facebook Town Hall: Proposed Facebook Principles
• Facebook Town Hall: Proposed Statement of Rights and Responsibilities

We look forward to your feedback in these groups. In addition, we welcome your feedback in the Developer Forum.

Paul leads the Facebook Platform Developer Operations & Support team.

Conceived shortly after the launch of Facebook Platform in 2007, the Facebook Developer Garage program is a community effort to bring the latest Facebook Platform information and technology to the back yards of more than 660,000 Facebook developers.

We have listened to feedback from Facebook Developer Garage hosts around the world and are continually looking for ways to provide more resources for each local community. That's why today we've expanded the program to incorporate another key player in the industry. We're excited to announce Intel will work with Facebook to sponsor a number of Facebook Developer Garages in 2009!

Intel is committed to fostering the Facebook developer community and increasing the scope of our Facebook Developer Garage program. This year, Facebook Developer Garages worldwide will serve as a forum to explore the latest Facebook technology with your peers, and we're looking forward to Intel's involvement. We believe their development tools and expertise will add additional insights and resources. “Our two companies share a vision of enhancing people's lives through technology and innovation," shared John Cooney from Intel's Partner Marketing Group. "We are very pleased to extend our support to the community of developers building useful, engaging, and entertaining apps for the Facebook Platform.”

Come join us at the first Facebook Developer Garage powered by Intel -- in Ireland on Thursday, March, 5th. We'll delve into the ins and outs of Facebook Platform and Facebook Connect. Also, check out the Facebook Platform Page to find other Garages in your area.

Since Facebook Connect launched, we've seen over 6,000 developers make their sites more social using Facebook Connect. One of the most common features we've seen sites add with Facebook Connect is the ability to allow users to log in with a single click and comment with their real name and profile photo from their Facebook account. Sites have seen as much as 40-50% more comments since they launched added these features.

Today, we're launching our first social widget for Facebook Connect, the Comments Box. The Comments Box is a great way for any website, blog or photo gallery to add social comments to their page in just a minute with a few lines of code. We want to help bring you social widgets that make it easier for users to communicate and share across your site and with their friends on Facebook.

With the Comments Box, Facebook users on your site can comment on your content, post those comments to their profiles, and share them with their friends on Facebook. The Comments Box allows non-Facebook users to make comments on your site as well. And via our APIs, you can access related comments made on Facebook as well to bring the conversation together.

To add the Comments Box to your site, follow these simple instructions:

1. Set up a basic Connect application. Take note of the API key and specify a callback URL to your website.
2. Download this cross-domain receiver file, and upload it to your website.
3. Add these snippets of code to each file where you want a Comments Box.
• Within the <html> tag, add: xmlns:fb="http://www.facebook.com/2008/fbml"
• Add the following code wherever you want a Comments Box to appear in your page. Replace '''YOUR_API_KEY_HERE''' with your API key, and include the path to the cross-domain receiver.

<script src=
"http://static.ak.connect.facebook.com/js/api_lib/v0.4/FeatureLoader.js.php" 
type="text/javascript"></script>

<fb:comments></fb:comments>

<script type="text/javascript">
FB.init("YOUR_API_KEY_HERE", "<path from web root>/xd_receiver.htm");
</script>

That's it, your Comments Box is ready! For more detailed instructions, go to our Developer Wiki or watch the video below.

The Comments Box comes with additional social features:

• Fully customizable: Specify background color, text color, and other attributes by providing your own custom CSS to incorporate this best into your site.
• Access to raw data: Query all comments via the comments.get API method or the comment FQL table.
• Administration and moderation: Manage the privacy and permissions of your comment boxes on an individual or global basis.
• Integrates seamlessly regardless of whether you do or don't have Facebook Connect already on your site.

This new Comments Box is just one of many social widgets that can help you easily integrate social features into your website with Facebook Connect. There are many more plugins and widgets available in our Facebook Connect Plugins Directory that may also fit your needs, including plugins for Movable Type, and commenting systems by Disqus and JS-Kit. To learn more about using 4th party plugins and widgets, check out our Facebook Connect Plugins Directory. If you are building 4th party widgets for Facebook Connect, stay tuned for some exciting updates on the policies and implementation coming next week.

Here's to increasing the number of comments and conversations!

We're excited to see the various ways you'll incorporate the Comments Box in your websites. Please send us any feedback on the Developer Forum.

We’re looking forward to seeing you at the Facebook Developer Garage Palo Alto at 6:30pm PST! Even if you’re not in the area, you can follow along with the action by watching our live UStream social video streaming below:

Live Video streaming by Ustream

Tune in to learn more about Feeds and Social Distribution. We’re excited to connect and collaborate with you.

We launched Facebook Platform to give you the opportunity to create innovative new experiences for our users, and with that gave you the flexibility to monetize those experiences in the ways you best saw fit.

Since launch we've seen many of your applications grow from brand new applications with zero users to businesses with tens to hundreds of thousands or even millions of monthly users. And as applications have grown, we've been excited to witness so many of you building real businesses based on your users' engagement and earning significant amounts of revenue via numerous models including advertising, sponsorships, and charging users for your (or related) services.

Given that so many of you have great tips and information, we're adding a few new pages to our Developer site and wiki to help you more easily share your best practices, ideas, and tips with each other around building your businesses:

• A brief overview of how to think about building a business, and commonly found business models on Facebook Platform
• A list of providers who can help you, including: ad networks, payment providers, and analytics companies
• Some interesting articles written by bloggers and the press

We encourage you to contribute to these wiki pages, as well as write your own stories, tips, suggestions, and articles. We will select some of the most interesting and invite you to write guest blog posts on our blog. If you have other topics you would like for us to explore or other things to share with us directly (but not publicly on the wiki) please submit them to our Developer Help page under the category "Monetization Tips."

Finally, we are always internally exploring different ways we can directly help you monetize better. Starting today you may notice a few applications occasionally serving Facebook Ads directly in their canvas pages as a part of a small alpha test. We will use the results of this test and other tests that we do to determine the best ways we can help you monetize. For this initial test we picked a few developers that had a variety of different user bases and application types to give us the kind of data we need. We will examine the results to decide whether to open up the program to more developers in the future.

We're excited about the growing number of monetization options using Facebook Platform, and we look forward to working together with you to build more successful businesses with applications on Facebook or Facebook Connect on your websites in 2009. We welcome your feedback on the Developer Forum.

Come join us next Thursday at our Facebook Developer Garage Palo Alto and hear about some of the latest features on Facebook Platform.

We'll focus on some of our core features around creating Feed stories and requests to help you get the best results for your application. Members of the Facebook Platform team will walk through the details of creating Feed stories and using Feed forms in your application. As a special bonus, get a preview of some upcoming improvements to Feed forms and Feed stories.

Facebook Developer Garage Palo Alto - Details

• What: Learn tips and tricks about Feeds and Social Distribution
• When: Thursday, February 19th, 2009
• Time: 6:30 PM – 9 :30 PM
• Where: Blue Chalk Café - Palo Alto

As space is limited, please RSVP soon by joining our Facebook event. We hope to see you there and are excited to connect and collaborate with you in person!

We plan to videotape this presentation and Q&A for those of you unable to join us.

Today we are hosting the OpenID User Experience Summit here at Facebook. We have product managers, user experience designers, and social Web experts from a variety of companies such as Google, Yahoo, Myspace, Plaxo, SixApart, Vidoop, Janrain and others. We're all here to focus on the user experience of OpenID and pushing it to new levels.

You can follow along with the action, this morning our friends over at UStream launched Facebook Connect and are helping us making live social video streaming possible. You can tune in live below.

We're excited to have you along with us for the event as we work to give more people the power to share and to be more open and connected through a better OpenID user experience.

Streaming Video by Ustream.TV

We're launching several new APIs for Facebook Platform today. These new interfaces open up access to the content and methods for sharing through several Facebook Applications -- including Facebook Status, Notes, Links (what we used to call Posted Items), and Video -- to go along with the APIs already available for uploading and viewing through Facebook Photos. We've seen increasing engagement with over 15 million users updating their status each day and sharing over 24 million links per month. We wanted to make sure this content and the ability to share this content was available through our standard APIs.

Specifically, your applications can now directly access all of a user's status, links, and notes via new methods and FQL calls. Your application will have access to any status, notes, or links from the active user or their friends that are currently visible to the active user. In addition, we're opening new APIs for you to post links, create notes, or upload videos for the current user, and we've made setting a user's status easier.

We're pretty excited to see what kinds of ideas you can come up with to help users create and share more content. For example, a travel application could make it really easy for users to create and share notes and upload photos and videos from a recent trip. Users could then display that content within a profile tab for that app. Or a news website could use Facebook Connect to allow users to easily post links from the site and feature all of the most recent links that a user's friends have shared from that website.

Every user is subject to limits on the length and size of the video files they can upload, just like they are when uploading through Facebook. Use video.getUploadLimits to determine a specific user's limits. To increase video upload limits, users can "verify" their accounts with Facebook. One simple way to verify an account is by confirming a mobile phone number with Facebook. You can determine whether a user has verified their account using FQL. You can render different content for verified users with the new FBML tag fb:if-is-verified.

As always, we look forward to hearing your feedback in our Developer Forum.

Enabling social information to flow through the Web is one of the core goals of Facebook. In the two months since Facebook Connect became generally available, over 4,000 sites and desktop applications have gone live with the service. Users can now log into sites across the Web using their Facebook account, bring their identity and friends with them, and share information and experiences using the same features as they would with applications on Facebook.

As we've launched and built Facebook Connect, we've been participants in OpenID efforts. One of our user experience experts, Julie Zhuo, presented at the UX Summit in October. Several of our engineers have been participating in meetups, and one of them ran as a community member for a board seat. We're happy to announce today that we are formalizing our support of the OpenID Foundation by officially joining the board. It is our hope that we can take the success of Facebook Connect and work together with the community to build easy-to-use, safe, open and secure distributed identity frameworks for use across the Web. As a next step in that effort, we will be hosting an OpenID Design Summit next week here at Facebook headquarters in Palo Alto.

We opened Facebook Platform with a belief that community innovation can add value to users that we can't build on our own. The core set of services and APIs we've introduced have allowed a thriving ecosystem to emerge. In our view, the success of the Platform community is a result of the strength of the products we produce, the opportunities provided to developers, and the value they deliver to users.

We see great opportunities to increase our contributions across the open stack, and to continue our work with the open source community to evolve existing projects like memcached and new technologies like Thrift, which is now being used by companies such as Powerset, iMeem, Rapleaf, Amie Street, last.fm and reCAPTCHA. The future of an open and social Web will be measured not by protocols, but by how much we collectively improve the standards and technologies that enable us and others to give people more powerful ways to share and connect.

This year, we’re excited that so many of you are joining us not only on the Web, but also in person. Our Facebook Developer Garage program aims to connect local developers so they can share new information about Facebook Platform, discuss ideas, and collaborate on projects. Last year, the Facebook Developer Garage program connected developers in over 55 regional communities. This year, we hope to expand the program by supporting and participating in even more Developer Garages worldwide.

Facebook Developer Garage London kicked off the year with a jam-packed event with 170 attendees meeting up at Sun Microsystems in London. Our London developers ran through the latest technical updates, the fastest growing Platform apps, and recent user stats -- and how to best leverage that information within the developer community. They concluded their Garage by sharing local Facebook Connect implementations and working together on new ideas over tasty refreshments.

We want to make it even easier for you to host a Facebook Developer Garage in your local community. Please check out our newly uploaded Garage-In-A-Box documentation to learn how to organize a Facebook Developer Garage in your area. If you just want to stop by and participate, check out our Garage Calendar for upcoming events.

We look forward to seeing you at a Facebook Developer Garage in a community near you!

*Special thanks to Joshua March and the crew that runs the Facebook Developer Garage London program .