Facebook Developers

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

New Features

• Make your Flash applications social with the ActionScript 3.0 Library for Facebook Platform.
• Integrate Facebook Platform into your iPhone apps using Facebook Connect for iPhone.
• Read about streams and how the new Feed system helps your application find success on the new home page.
• Give your users the ability to chat with their friends and invite them to your applications with fb:chat-invite.
• Explore how users can engage with your applications on the new Facebook Pages like they do on profiles.

Updates

• As a reminder to our January announcement, 64-bit user IDs will start being assigned to new users in the coming days, so make sure you're storing user IDs using 64-bit integers.
• You can submit new applications to the Application Directory if they have either 5 total users or 10 monthly active users (MAU).
• When a user visits your canvas page (on apps.facebook.com/appname), the page's favicon becomes that of your application.
• fb:title now displays "<app name> on Facebook | <page name>".

Announcements

• We announced the third round of fbFund, emphasizing Web and iPhone apps using Facebook Connect. Apply now!

Articles/Videos

• View a discussion between Adobe and Facebook on creating Flash applications using the Adobe Flash ActionScript 3.0 Library for Facebook Platform.
• Mark Pincus, Zynga's founder and CEO, shares his thoughts on how his company finds revenue in retaining users.
• Watch how you can create a Facebook Connect for iPhone app in minutes!

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're excited to announce that Adobe and Facebook are working together to provide official support for building rich social applications in Flash. An updated version of the ActionScript 3.0 Client Library for Facebook Platform is fully open and available for download now, along with a full set of materials and samples at the Adobe Developer Connection.

Flash has long been one of the most popular languages for building applications on Facebook or integrating with Facebook Connect. Many top applications such as Texas HoldEm Poker by Zynga, Pet Society by Playfish, and Music by iLike, and Red Bull's Connect Site use Flash heavily to provide rich and engaging experiences through audio, video, real-time interactions, and more. Flash has been supported since the launch of Facebook Platform in 2007 through tags like fb:swf and fb:fbjs-bridge, embedding Flash in Feed stories, and multiple client libraries, which have helped you make Facebook API calls directly from ActionScript.

As we reviewed support for ActionScript, we found that the client libraries out there were all really good, but none were complete and fully up-to-date. We worked closely with Adobe to take the open source version started by Jason Crist and revamp it to support all Facebook APIs and add some features to better support authentication for Facebook Platform and Facebook Connect.

The new ActionScript 3.0 Client Library for Facebook Platform is now the fourth officially supported client library for Facebook Platform (after PHP, JavaScript, and iPhone). Download the code, try it out with your Flash applications or Facebook Connect sites, and share your feedback with us on our Developer Forum.

We can't wait to see what you do next with Flash Platform and Facebook Platform.

If you are in San Francisco this week, please come join us Thursday night to learn more and celebrate!

Apply now with startup entries for Web & iPhone apps using Facebook Connect

We're thrilled to see thousands of developers creating innovative, engaging, social experiences with Facebook Connect. Now, we're excited to announce support for developers with a new round of fbFund funding focused on Facebook Connect.

Recipients from the first two rounds have experienced many successes including incredible growth, partnerships and acquisition. fbFund finalist Weddingbook was recently acquired by TheKnot, Inc., and other finalists formed partnerships with prominent brands such as Pepsi, Red Bull, Amazon and Stanford University. Together, we've continued to build a great community of new entrepreneurs building on Facebook Platform.

How the selection process works:
Initially, we'll select 50 teams based on their app metrics, developer talent and potential to succeed. From those teams we'll choose a subset, offering them the opportunity to receive up to $100,000 in equity investment and an invitation to participate in an incubator program to be held later this summer in Palo Alto, CA. While in Silicon Valley, the teams will connect with Facebook engineers and executives, along with successful entrepreneurs, angel investors, and venture capitalists who can provide real-world advice, insight and perspectives to help the teams build successful startups.

We encourage any team or company to apply as long as they have not received any formal venture funding. We invite you to learn more and apply on the fbFund Page. Check out our resources on the Facebook Developer site to help you get started.

We're accepting applications now through April 20, 2009. We look forward to funding the next group of talented entrepreneurs making the world more open and social!

About fbFund
fbFund is a $10 million seed fund managed by Founders Fund, Accel Partners, and Facebook.

The goal of Facebook Platform has always been to make the Web more social. As we have grown, the Web too has expanded to the desktop, and now to many different mobile devices and platforms throughout the world. By connecting your users, giving them the power to share, and the power to be more open, any software experience can become more social.

Facebook Connect has been the next evolution for us in giving you the ability to add social context by integrating identity, friends, and Feed into your experience. Now, with the all new Facebook stream and public profiles, you will be able to give more users the ability to connect and share with everything that they care about in real time.

Since we launched Facebook Connect last December, we’ve seen over 6,000 websites become more social. These sites can reach new users and build deeper engagement using the power of the social graph and social streams.

Just this weekend, Facebook Connect went one step further - off the Web and to your mobile. We introduced Facebook Connect for iPhone so that now your favorite iPhone apps can have friends, too. You can download the SDK, read the documentation, and watch a quick 5 minute video on how to get started now.

Since the launch of Facebook Connect for iPhone on Saturday, 10 Facebook Connect apps are already available in the App Store:

• Agency Wars
• Binary Game
• iBowl
• Live Poker
• Movies
• Sportacular
• Tap Tap Revenge 2
• Urbanspoon
• Who Has the Biggest Brain?
• Whrrl

Facebook Connect for Desktop has seen amazing interest from products like Xobni for Outlook and Apple iPhoto. One month ago we released the all-new open Facebook Status API. Saturday, Seesmic launched Seesmic for Facebook, one of the first desktop client applications for Facebook Status.

Today, we’re happy to announce that Tweetdeck has launched full support for Facebook Status. This allows you to connect and share with your friends around Facebook Status directly from your desktop.

We are excited to see Facebook Connect going beyond the Web to even more software experiences no matter where they are. Share your comments with us on our Developer Forum. We can’t wait to see what you come up with next.

We're really excited to launch Facebook Connect for iPhone today. Facebook Connect easily lets developers make their websites and desktop applications more social. And with the explosion of iPhone apps over the last year, we want iPhone developers to reap all the benefits Facebook provides.

If you develop apps for the iPhone and iPod Touch, you can now start making those apps more social. With just a few lines of Objective-C code, your users can log in to Facebook from within your app, find their friends, then share what they do in your app back on Facebook, which opens up exciting new opportunities for your users.

Now your iPhone apps can enjoy the benefits that Facebook Connect sites and Facebook Platform apps already enjoy, including:

• Making API calls so your app can access users' profiles and share information on Facebook.
• Publishing to Facebook via Feed forms.
• Asking users for extended permissions, like offline access, so you can still interact with their data when they're offline.

To get started, download the Facebook Connect for iPhone code, read the documentation, and start coding!

Also, you can take 5 minutes to watch the video below, which shows how you can integrate Facebook Connect for iPhone with your app.

Speaking of video, if you aren't here with us at South by Southwest (SXSW), you can watch our presentations later today on the Developer site.

Launching Today

We're excited to share with you these participating apps, which are already live in the App Store. Stay tuned for more coming soon.

• Agency Wars
• Binary Game
• iBowl
• Live Poker
• Movies
• Sportacular
• Tap Tap Revenge 2
• Urbanspoon
• Who Has the Biggest Brain?
• Whrrl

We can't wait to see your iPhone apps become more social. Share your comments with us on our Developer Forum.

Today we have a crew of Facebookers headed to the live music capital of the world - Austin, Texas - for South by Southwest Interactive 2009. We look forward to this event every year because of the diversity of the crowd it draws. No other conference in the world brings together the best of the Internet with the best of music, film, and design culture. Developers and rock stars alike roam the streets of Austin, connect and share new ideas, and code the nights away in search of building a more open and social Web. It is truly a cultural experience for the digital citizen.

Earlier this week, we released the scheduled of Facebook-related speakers and events. If you missed it, be sure to check it out here.

On Saturday, I'll be delivering a keynote speech at 11:30 AM called "The Search for a More Social Web." As we look out across the history of Facebook Platform and into 2009 and beyond, we are pushing the boundaries of openness on the Internet by continuing to push the Web (and the world) to be more open and social. This year, we've got a lot of amazing things to talk about. And even some great new announcements that we think you'll love.

On Sunday, we've got a packed schedule starting with a full Facebook Developer Garage featuring guest speakers from Playfish, Drop.io, Causes, and more.

Sunday night, I am excited to announce that two amazingly talented musicians are joining us to rock the annual exclusive Facebook friends.get Party.

First on the stage will be a newcomer to the music scene, LIGHTS. She fuses electronica based pop, rock and new wave sounds with mellifluous vocals that combine for a unique listening experience. She just finished integrating Facebook Connect into her site, so not only is she innovating in the music world but she's making it happen on the Web, too. We think she's going to rock.

Second, we couldn't be more excited to have Flosstradamus headlining the party. They've been making waves and packing clubs around the world with their unique style and focus on making people dance. They are sure to put on quite the show.

Lastly, this year we'll be cruising the streets of Austin with Flip Cams looking to tell your story. And asking one question: How are you making the Web a more social place? So, if you see any of us from Facebook, stop by and give us a shout. We'll post your story to the all-new Facebook Platform Profile for the entire Facebook community to see.

See you in Austin!

The NCAA Men's College Basketball Tournament, also known as March Madness, officially begins next Thursday, March 19. Building a bracket and challenging your friends has long been a special activity for many U.S. users on Facebook - first with an application developed by Facebook, and more recently with applications developed on Facebook Platform. Over 800,000 users are already engaging with related applications on Facebook Platform.

Because there is a short period of time between Selection Sunday (March 15th) and the tournament beginning on the following Thursday, we have seen users have some challenges getting all of their friends and bracket groups set up in time. To try to address that problem, we're allowing for a higher request flow, while we monitor the impact and ensure users have a great experience without seeing a significant increase in spam. We hope to offer similar privileges in the future for other events.

We'd like to welcome any app that is focused on building brackets and challenging friends around the 2009 NCAA Tournament to this test. We identified several 2009 bracket applications via the Application Directory that are live already, and have reached out to those developers. If you are building one and we have missed you, please contact us and include NCAA Bracket in the "Issue Summary" field. We will review your application to ensure that it meets standard Facebook policies and then will add you to the test.

We'd love to hear your feedback on these changes. Please add your comments to our Developer Forum.

We announced last week that we're improving Feed and Feed forms in order to give your applications more effective and consistent distribution in the stream on the new Facebook home page. Today, we’re starting to roll out these features to users.

One intention with the improvements to Feed forms is to give you the ability to make the most of the stream without requiring you to change your applications or learn any new API calls. If you don't make any changes, your applications will continue to operate as they do today, and even better, stories that are published via Feed Forms will appear more frequently within the stream.

If you want to further improve how your application integrates with the stream, here's a summary of some of the enhancements we've made.

Overview of Enhancements

• Facebook.showFeedDialog and FB.Connect.showFeedDialog now take two extra, optional parameters:
  • user_message_prompt, which is a text entry field that appears next to the prompt on a Feed form where the user can write "What’s on your mind?".
  • user_message, which is the default text that appears in field for the user's message on the story. You should include this text as the property value of an object.
• We deprecated the story_size parameter for FB.Connect.showFeedDialog.
• feed.publishUserAction now can take a user_message parameter that gets appended to any short stories published on behalf of a user, provided the user has specified to allow your application to always publish short stories. Please note that the user_message parameter is not supported with 1-line stories.
• We made the following changes to Feed stories:
• Full stories are no longer displayed on the home page or profile.
• You are no longer required to provide a title for short story templates.
• We no longer aggregate Feed stories, so you don't need to create an array of templates of a given size or call Feed.registerTemplateBundle.
• One-line stories will only appear on the Profile in the “recent activity” section. They will not appear in the stream.

Read the Stream Release Notes for the most complete information about improvements with streams, Feed, and the new home page. And keep an eye on this blog and the Platform Status Feed for more details. We'd love to hear your feedback on these changes. Please add your comments to our Developer Forum.

If you weren’t able to join us for DEMO 09, we hope you’ll be able to connect with us in person at the SXSW Interactive Festival in Austin, Texas. SXSW is one of the premier interactive conferences with some of the most engaging developers, entrepreneurs, and visionaries in the tech industry. The Facebook team will be heading down south for five days of inspiring panels, exciting events, and informative meetings with developers like you.

We’ll be hosting and participating in a number of events at SXSW. Check out the details of our plans below. We hope you’ll be able to join us for one or more events!

SXSW Panels and Events

March 13th
Panel: Games By the People, For the People

• Facebook Speaker: Gareth Davis
• Date / Time: Friday, March 13th, 3:30-4:30 PM
• Location: Room C
• Overview: Exploring the enormous user-generated content opportunities available to anyone interested in game design.

March 14th
Presentation: The Search for a More Social Web

• Facebook Speaker: Dave Morin
• Date / Time: Saturday, March 14th, 11:30 AM-12:30 PM
• Location: Room 8
• Overview: The Web is about people. Learn about efforts to move toward a more social Web and how openness creates better experiences for sharing and connecting.

Panel: Feed Me: Bite Size Info for a Hungry Internet

• Facebook Speaker: Ari Steinberg
• Date / Time: Saturday, March 14th, 3:30-4:30 PM
• Location: Room B
• Overview: Users are consuming shorter and more frequent content. This session examines social trends, as well as the technologies that make feed-based communication possible.

March 15th
Event: Facebook Developer Garage Austin - Powered by Intel

• Date / Time: Sunday, March 15th, 1:00-4:00 PM
• Location: Pangaea - 409 Colorado Street, Austin
• Overview: Join your developer community and some of our most engaging Facebook developers for a jam-packed Developer Garage. Learn the latest from Facebook, Alamofire, Drop.io, and Causes.
• Admittance: You must RSVP to the above event to get on the list. SXSW badges will not provide admittance.

Event: Exclusive Facebook Friends.get Party with Red Bull.

• Date / Time: Sunday, March 15th, 9:30 PM-1:00 AM
• Location: Pangaea - 409 Colorado Street, Austin
• Overview: Do you develop, build, or dance like a superstar? Come hang out with Facebook and the interactive community on March 15th for a great party and live entertainment at Austin's hottest club, Pangaea.
• Admittance: You must RSVP to the above event to get on the list. SXSW badges will not provide admittance.To request an invitation click here.

March 16th
Panel: Scaling Synchronous Web Apps

• Facebook Speaker: Serkan Piantino
• Date / Time: Monday, March 16th, 10:00 AM -11 AM
• Location: Room Hilton B
• Overview: Serious server-side engineers will talk about how they were able to get around some of the tricky ins and outs of building a fast, reliable, scalable, synchronous Web application.

Panel: Social Media and Social Change

• Facebook Speaker: Randi Zuckerberg
• Date / Time: Monday, March 16th, 11:30 AM – 2:00 PM
• Location: Stubb’s BBQ, 801 Red River Street, Austin
• Overview: A dynamic discussion on how social media has aided individuals and organizations with contributing to their communities. See you at Stubb’s BBQ.

Event: 9th annual 20x2

• Facebook Speaker: Josh Elman
• Date / Time: Monday March 16th, 7:00 -9:30 PM
• Location: Parish on 6th St in Austin
• Overview: 20 different participants from all walks of creative life, each person has two minutes to answer/interpret the same question before a live audience. The question for this show is "What's It Gonna Take?"

For a detailed look into the SXSW offerings, please check out the SXSW Page or the Facebook Platform Page. We’ll see you there!

We're always looking for ways to help users engage with their friends and bring them into your application experiences. Today, we're excited to launch the ability for you to let users initiate Facebook Chat conversations in applications on Facebook. Not only will this allow for greater interaction within your application, but it can also provide significant growth as users invite their friends to join them in real-time.

With the new fb:chat-invite FBML tag, you can display a list of a user's online friends and allow the user to invite a friend to chat. Like with the multi-friend selector, you can customize which friends should or shouldn't appear in this list using the exclude_ids parameter.

There are countless ways applications can integrate this feature. For instance, users can invite friends to start a live game, a couple can plan a trip or their wedding together sharing links, or friends can exchange reviews on music/restaurants/gadgets--all without leaving your application. We're sure you'll come up with even more ways to use this new functionality.

If your application uses Flash or has content rendered by fb:iframe, you can use this tag wrapped in some FBJS code. For the technical details, read fb:chat-invite.

We'll have an XFBML/iframe version of this tag available soon.

As always, we look forward to your feedback on this feature. Please share your comments in the Developer Forum.

We wanted to give you some details on what the changes to Facebook Pages announced today means to you and how your applications can benefit from them.

The user profile design we launched last year fueled applications that provide rich, engaging experiences. As the new Pages design moves closer to user profiles, you will have similar application integration points to drive user engagement and distribution while helping businesses build their presence on Facebook. Available today are profile boxes and application tabs that fit within the new tab structure on Pages (which includes Wall, Info and Boxes tabs). Here are some of the most important highlights on how these components work on Pages:

• Profile boxes: Profile boxes that fit in today's wide (380 pixels) and narrow (200 pixels) columns on a Page will continue to work with the new Page design; these boxes will appear on the Boxes tab. Page owners can choose narrow column boxes that are up to 250 pixels in height for the Wall and Info tabs.
• Custom application tabs: Applications can now offer a rich experience through full-width tabs. Moreover, as Page owners can link directly to an application tab, we expect new opportunities for you to design tabs suitable as engaging marketing campaign destinations.
• Boxes tab: Like we did with user profiles, application profile boxes will get migrated to the Boxes tab on a Page. Page owners can select which tabs fans and non-fans initially see when they visit the Page. The default option for non-fans is the Boxes tab since many Page owners have invested time and effort to customize the applications that best represent them (the default tab for fans is the Wall tab).

What’s Next?

In the coming weeks, you will see more ways to gain distribution as you help businesses share content. We will enable applications to integrate into the Publisher on Pages and to use Feed forms to publish stories. Meanwhile, applications on Pages should continue to use feed.publishTemplatizedAction to publish stories to a Page's Wall and into the News Feed of their fans' friends.

To learn more about how to make sure your application works for Pages, read the release notes for the new Facebook Pages design. Also starting today, Page owners can begin interacting with the new design and deciding how to transition their Pages. Similarly, you can test your application by visiting any Page for which you are an admin. In about one week's time, we will migrate all Pages to the new profile design.

We'll keep you updated as the new integration points come online. Keep an eye on this blog and the Platform Status Feed. If you have any feedback, visit our Developer Forum.

We're excited to announce a preview of our new home page and some upcoming changes to Feed and Feed forms that will transform the ways users share and consume information through Facebook. These enhancements should give you, as Facebook Platform developers, much more effective and consistent distribution for your application or website from the content and actions users actively share from your experience.

Earlier today, we posted our thoughts on the social streams and some new directions we're taking with our Pages product, as well as a preview of our new home page. As we're making these changes, we wanted to give you an overview of how they will affect you as you build applications on Facebook, integrate Facebook Connect into your website, or build applications to support Facebook Pages.

With these changes,you'll want to create great Feed stories from within your application or website to take advantage of the new opportunities. Soon we'll publish a post that goes into more depth on the changes for applications on Facebook Pages.

First, check out the tour of the new home page if you haven't yet.

New Facebook Home Page

With the new profile last year, we introduced new ways for users to share into their Feed and display what they are sharing with new Feed forms and multiple story sizes. The upcoming changes to the home page extend this further and take the News Feed and make it a more dynamic stream of information and content that users are sharing in their own voice.

Stream: The new Stream on the home page will include all posts by a user's friends. This means all posts that users publish through the Publisher or from Feed forms within your application or site will appear directly in the Stream of the users' friends. The Stream will include all stories of the current "short" story size. The Stream will not include one-line stories that are automatically published through APIs, though these will continue to appear on profiles and impact the Highlights section referenced below.

Filters: Filters will allow users to view streams from different lists of friends or from specific applications. By default, several common Facebook applications will be listed as filters. Users can choose additional applications from a drop-down list and add them as permanent filters. The applications that users and their friends frequently use and have multiple stories available for a user to view are most likely to appear in this list. This can be a great way for your application to gain additional visibility and usage.

Publisher: The Publisher on the home page will be an improved version of the current Publisher that appears on user profile pages. All existing Publisher integrations will be supported and will now be available directly from users' home pages. In the new Publisher, the comment will appear above the attachment and is intended to represent what the user is saying about the content they are sharing. This new Publisher will appear on user profiles as well. Please see below for more information about the Publisher size.

Highlights: The Highlights area features content that a users' friends have interacted with. Applications will frequently appear in the highlights area based on how frequently a users' friends are interacting with the app.

Two additional changes you may notice:

• To create more space on the page for dynamic content, we've consolidated the bookmarks into the bottom bar of the screen with the Applications menu. This has already become the most common way for users to access their applications, and we'll continue working on more ways for users to find and access their applications.
• The number of outstanding requests will appear at the top of the screen, after "welcome [name]".

Emphasizing What Users Are Sharing

The new Stream is focused on what users are saying and sharing with their friends. As we make these changes, we encourage you to think about the Feed stories from your applications and help focus those around enabling users to share content in their own words.

Feed stories should:

• Reflect sharing the results of direct user action or content users want to share.
• Be written in the user's voice (instead of reporting).
• Include rich content from your application - text, images, video, Flash.

For example, instead of saying "Josh posted a photo" with a description underneath the photo, the story will now include the user comment at the top, and then the body will simply contain the photo and perhaps context about when or where the photo was taken. Or instead of saying "Josh just rated a movie", the user comment can be a short review of the movie or just "5 stars, it was great" and the body would contain an image and description of the movie.

The new Feed form will offer the user a chance to add an additional comment as they publish content to their profile. This will take the existing story title, story body, and media item and attach them to the user's comment when this gets published. Going forward, the new Feed form will only support what is currently the short story size.

We'll introduce some new APIs that will allow you to extend the new Feed forms and Feed publishing to pre-fill and access the comments users make as they are publishing stories. All of your Feed stories will be migratedautomaticallyand work in the new Feed forms. We encourage you to take any user comments in your Feed stories and use those comments to pre-fill the user comment section.

What Should I Do Now?

First off, you don't need to do anything. All of the current APIs and content for creating and publishing Feed stories as well as Publisher integration will continue to work as they do now.

We encourage you to think about using Feed forms and prompting publishing of stories from within your application or website whenever appropriate. Stories published through Feed forms will probably see more distribution than they do today through News Feed since each time a user directly publishes a short story it will automatically appear in their friends' News Feeds. If you are using automatic publishing (feed.publishUserAction) to publish one-line stories, those will continue to appear on users' profiles. And auto-published stories will be used to help aggregate application stories that will appear in the Highlights section of the new home page.

Please note that once these changes go live, the full story size will no longer be supported. You can continue to pass it in, but it will not appear on Facebook profiles or home pages. Also be aware that aggregation of short Feed stories using Feed templates will no longer happen on the home page, so you will not need to continue designing for that model.

If you currently support a Publisher integration, please be aware that the width of the Publisher will be changing and become somewhat narrower. As such, we encourage you to redesign your publisher integration to be "fluid" design instead of a fixed width for more flexibility. Publishers that are fluid layout will appear inline in the experience. Publishers at the older fixed width will appear in a popup when a user selects them. We will offer a way to let you specify when your Publisher supports a fluid layout.

Keep an eye on this blog and the Platform Status Feed for more details. We'd love to hear your feedback on these changes. Please add your comments to our Developer Forum.

With over 175 million users worldwide, Facebook is continuously exploring new ways to improve our international user experience. We recently challenged our international community of developers to build engaging apps for our French and Spanish speaking users, and we're proud to announce that we've selected two Grand Prize winners.

While our “Translations” application helps our international users connect with their friends and family more easily, we wanted to offer our users an even more customized experience on Facebook through social applications. Over the course of four months, we received more than 150 applications for The Facebook French and Spanish Application Contests, from talented developers around the world.

Our Grand Prize winners were selected based on the following guidelines as judged by the Facebook Platform team--evidence of native language skills, intimate knowledge of the country and expertise of engaging and meaningful applications. Today, we’re here to announce the winners, who will be awarded 10,000 Euros each.

French Grand Prize Winner: Pour un nouveau capitalisme - The "For a New Capitalism" application uses slideshows and quizzes to teach users about “Social Business” and encourages them to submit ideas for how capitalism can be ecological, socially transformative, and profitable. These ideas will be voted on, and the winner will be invited to meet Nobel Peace Prize winner, Mohammed Yunis, on March 6th, in Paris!

Spanish Grand Prize Winner: Publistars- A game show to test your knowledge of the advertising world. You can play among your friends in more than nine different mini-games with over 5,000 questions.

Congratulations to the winners! For additional details, please check out the French Application Page or Spanish Application Page. We hope to continue seeing meaningful international experiences built in the near future.

Mark Pincus is the Founder and CEO of Zynga, one of the leading social game companies on Facebook. Zynga builds some of the top applications, including Texas HoldEm Poker, Mafia Wars, and YoVille. We’ve asked him to post on the Facebook developer blog today about how Zynga is building a sustainable business on Facebook Platform.

If you have suggestions you would like to share, please contribute them on the Developer Forum here or submit them to us privately here, categorized as "monetization tips."

Facebook has been an amazing platform for us. Not only are we able to build deep communities within our games on Facebook, we’ve been able to drive revenue off of that activity. In our view, the key is creating experiences that gamers are willing to pay for—that may not sound profound, but many developers overlook it when building apps.

At Zynga, our top priorities are reach (the number of users who try our apps) and retention (the number of users who repeatedly use our apps). Revenue is a third priority, but only if it doesn’t interfere with reach and retention. Our goal is to bring the fun into the powerful social experience that Facebook has enabled to as many people as possible. In pursuit of that goal, we’ve discovered a few things that have helped us monetize more effectively. Here are the two most important:

1. Focus on Retention – Keep Them Wanting More. We find that users who come back frequently are often the ones who are willing to pay. If your app doesn’t draw people back again and again, it will never earn any money. Fun game play is a core element, and we are constantly working on ways to provide users with the most entertaining experience possible. Another important part of this model is allowing users to interact with the bulk of your product for free. The free-to-play model works well on Facebook, and consists of providing games to users for free, and if they choose, they can upgrade elements of the games for a small fee.

We also use the Facebook communication channels (notifications and feed stories) to encourage players to come back. We find that notifications that are socially relevant get the highest click-through rates. For example, we will send notifications to players engaged with the game when one of their friends beats their high score in our word game Scramble.

In practice, a small portion of hardcore users will generate most of your income. Facebook can help you reach millions of users for free, but only you can keep them coming back, and give them an experience worth paying for.

2. Have a Mixed Revenue Stream. At Zynga, our revenues are evenly split (33/33/33) among banner advertising, direct user pay, and CPA offers. We think it’s important to not rely on banner advertising alone. In fact, we consider banner ad revenue to be “gravy” above our core product.

We focus on providing experiences people are willing to pay for. For example, users who play Zynga’s Texas HoldEm Poker are willing to pay for poker chips, and Mafia Wars players often pay for reward points, because these purchases enhance the game experience. CPA offers (where users receive credit for filling out surveys, for example) are another option, and a great way for users who don’t have the money to spend to interact with the game at its full potential.

To summarize, build something people are willing to pay for, keep them around so they will pay for it, and give them as many ways to pay as possible.

February was an active month for the worldwide Facebook Developer Garage program, with four garages held from London to Palo Alto, Chicago and Toronto. Facebook Developer Garages are local events supported by Facebook that developers in our community can host to share ideas and network in a local setting. This year, we’re excited to provide even more resources by including Intel as a sponsor of our Garage community.

Facebook Developer Garage London led the charge this month discussing Facebook’s new APIs and how to utilize them. They also hosted a second charity-based event to create apps that leverage the FBML bespoke codes and allow people to donate using Causes.

Later in our hometown of Palo Alto, over 400 developers attended the Facebook Developer Garage Palo Alto led by Josh Elman and Dave Morin, who discussed Feeds and Social Distribution. We gave the first public look at our first social widget, the Comments Box, which launched earlier that day. We also showed a sneak peak of future Feed forms and Feed stories coming soon.

Over in Chicago, more than 170 developers gathered to meet Luke Shepard from the Platform team to learn about the technical aspects of Facebook Connect. Participants discovered more about OpenID and networked with other developers over refreshments.

Facebook Developer Garage Toronto closed the month with over 400 developers packed into their Canadian Garage. Matt Wyndowe from the Facebook team presented the latest stats on Facebook Connect and developer Kevin Lister from Wedsnap discussed the Wedbook application, fbFund, and the process of being acquired by The Knot.

We look forward to hearing from you about the next Garage you host or attend!

*Special thanks to our Garage hosts: Facebook Developer Garage London, Where I've Been, Crafted Fun, Refresh Partners, and Trapeze.