Facebook Developers

Today we are excited to announce an important step toward greater openness through Facebook Platform. For the first time, we're opening the core Facebook product experience -- the stream -- with the new Facebook Open Stream API.

The home page design centralizes the stream of information that tells you what's going on right now in the world around you. With the Facebook Open Stream API users will be able to use applications to read and interact with their stream, anywhere. As a Facebook developer you'll also be able to access the stories you've published into the stream and display them in your application, whether it's on a mobile device, Web site or desktop, for users however you choose.

To enable developers to access the stream, we've built the Facebook Open Stream API in part using the emerging Activity Streams standard. Over the last several months, we've been collaborating with the community, hosting meetups at Facebook headquarters, and speaking at industry events about Activity Streams and the open stack. We think that working alongside our peers to create an open standard for accessing and consuming streams is the future. We'll continue to make contributions to the standards community and related technologies and are happy to be one of the first companies to implement Activity Streams at scale.

We've also created robust new APIs called stream.get and stream.publish and new FQL tables that enable you to directly access the stream. With these new methods, you can access the stream on behalf of a user and then display the content in the manner most relevant for the user experience. You can filter, remix, or display the stream however you choose, wherever you choose. In addition, through other API methods, users can publish back into the stream, add comments, and even ‘likes’ to any stream item through any interface that publishes to the stream.

Consistent with our previous steps toward greater openness, we believe users must have full control and choice and that's exactly how we've designed Facebook Platform and the Open Stream API. All Facebook Platform terms governing data use apply and an application or Web site can only access a user's homepage or profile stream if the user specifically gives permission to the application. At that point, the application or Facebook Connect site will only have access to the information if a user hasn't changed their privacy settings to prevent applications from accessing it.

To get things started we've worked alongside a few beta partners to test the Facebook Open Stream API. For example, Seesmic Desktop is now a full-featured client for the stream and Adobe has created a simple stream Notifier built on Adobe AIR.

In addition, we've created a sample client application, Facebook Desktop for AIR. It's built on Adobe's AIR development platform and includes all of the APIs we released today. Before you can use the application, you need to install Adobe AIR. Then, you can either download the official Facebook Desktop for AIR or you can compile your own copy, which is available in our public repository.

You can get started by reading the documentation. Please share your comments and feedback in the Developer Forum.

We can't wait to see the amazing new experiences you build for the more than 200 million Facebook users.

With the launch of the stream, we made some significant improvements to the Publisher to make it more prominent. The Publisher now appears on a user's home page so users can easily post content like photos and videos to their profile right from their home page. The Publisher still appears on user profiles. Through the Publisher, users can easily and directly post content to their profiles including text, photos, and content from any of the applications they use that integrate with the Publisher.

With the new home page, we reduced the width of the Publisher to fit on the home page. Because many application Publisher integrations were designed with fixed widths wider than the new design, we created a special pop-up mode for those publishers when a user selected one.

If you have a Publisher integration for your application, you can easily design your Publisher so that it appears inline as well. If your Publisher currently appears in the pop-up interface and you would like to switch to inline, build a fluid layout that can scale any width between 370px and 430px. Please use a fluid layout, because the Publisher lives on multiple pages at varying widths.

Once you have a fluid layout, go to your application settings and, on the “User Profiles” tab, set the radio button at the bottom of the page to "Inline".

If you still haven’t created a Publisher for your application or website, you haven’t tapped into one of the greatest ways to encourage users to share content with for your application. Check it out!

Guest post by Founders Fund startup investor and geek blogger Dave McClure, who will be running the fbFund 2009 Incubator Program.

• "Everything that can be invented has been invented." - Charles Duell, US patent office, 1899.
• "Rock & Roll will be gone by June." - Variety Magazine, 1955
• "There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home." - Ken Olsen, President Digital Equipment Corp (DEC), 1977

Let's face it: Facebook Apps are old news. Past their prime. Over the hill... right?

Au Contraire, Mon Frére!

Actually, it's exactly the opposite. Over 200 million people of every age, shape, size, & color are now using Facebook. Every month more than 70% of those folks use Facebook apps. Over 800 third-party apps have 100,000 or more monthly active users (MAUs). Facebook Connect is now being used by major brands and retailers like NetFlix, CNN, and LiveNation, and Facebook Connect is now available for iPhone developers as well. Lastly and most importantly, Facebook app developers are making big bucks and continue to receive funding, announce partnerships, and grow their businesses.

We're just at the beginning of a brave new world of cool & interesting social applications and services, built both on and off Facebook Platform. This year with Facebook Connect for web apps and iPhone, developers are creating awesome new solutions for the hundreds of millions worldwide who use Facebook. In fact we're so sure it's a growth market, we're betting hundreds of thousands of dollars on developers just like YOU through the fbFund 2009 Incubator Program. Read on to learn how to apply, or just get in the game:

Apply and get started now

(Hurry up homes, the deadline to apply is April 20th!)

Still not convinced? Alright you cynics, check out these apples...

In the past year, we've seen several fbFund apps reach commercial success, and even get acquired:

• WedSnap, maker of Weddingbook, recently acquired by TheKnot
• Zimride, maker of Carpool, announced a partnership with ZipCar
• Sociable (formerly Party Buzz), just helped launch a Facebook Connect integration with LiveNation
• MouseHunt is on fire, growing to >500K MAUs recently

This year our new fbFund 2009 Incubator program will enable a few lucky startups using Facebook and Facebook Connect to receive up to $100,000 in investment and a "golden ticket" to come to Palo Alto for the summer. Here in Silicon Valley, we'll work together with Facebook and other tech companies and experienced mentors to help build new apps, websites, and businesses that show off the best of social apps and platforms. Initially we'll name 50 finalists from those who apply for the program, who will receive $1,000 in Facebook advertising. From the 50 finalists, we'll then select a smaller group to receive funding and participate in the incubator program (mid June - late August). The program will feature regular weekly tech talks and education on Facebook platform, Facebook Connect, technical infrastructure, product design, startup metrics and optimization, SEO, internet marketing, startup funding and hiring, and a variety of other topics of interest.

We are also announcing the Mentors on our fbFund Developer Advisory Council, who will participate in the Incubator Program with all of our fbFund 2009 startups. Here is a current list, in alphabetical order, of Advisor / Mentors (note: we expect to add more folks to this list in coming weeks):

• Accel Partners
• Citizen Sports
• Facebook
• First Round Capital (Josh Kopelman)
• Flixster
• Founders Fund
• KISSmetrics
• Kontagent
• Playfish
• RockYou
• Serious Business
• Stanford University (BJ Fogg, Rajeev Motwani)
• SGN
• ShareThrough
• Slide
• Tapulous
• Zynga

Needless to say, we're just getting this party started. Facebook apps are still growing like crazy, and Facebook Connect is opening up tremendous new opportunities for sharing and distribution on both the webtop and the iPhone. We have a pocketful of cash to put to work on people and startups who are ready to make social apps and experiences explode across the web and mobile devices. We hope you'll apply now for the fbFund 2009 Incubator Program, and we look forward to seeing some of you in Silicon Valley this summer!

Rock & Roll, folks :)

We've found that the performance of a website is one of the most important factors in increasing overall growth and usage. To help developers increase user engagement, we've released the quick transitions feature to improve the front-end performance of canvas page applications.

Quick transitions uses Ajax to change pages without reloading the entire frame. While it's enabled, important Facebook features like Chat, Search, and the Applications menu do not need to reload as a user views subsequent pages.

You can enable quick transitions on the Canvas tab in the application settings editor. If you have an FBML canvas page, you don't need to take any further steps. IFrame applications can also use this feature or use a custom approach. Read the quick transitions documentation for more information.

This is a beta feature so please report any bugs you encounter. And share your comments and feedback in the Developer Forum.

For Facebook Platform developers, the new home page design offers a powerful opportunity to widely distribute content that users want to share from your application - whether from a Facebook Connect site, canvas page, desktop, or device. The new stream focuses on real-time conversations and updates as the entry point to Facebook, and new API parameters allow users to personalize Feed stories.

Since launching these features, users have increased engagement with Platform application stories, and overall Platform usage has grown. These are positive indicators of the compelling ways that developers are leveraging the stream. To provide you and your users with a better experience, we’d like to offer the following guidance as well as introduce our updated Feed policy.

Help Users Share What Matters Most

Typically, users want to share with friends only after doing something significant; otherwise they risk violating social expectations around over-communication and spam. Think about content and interactions within your application that users would like to broadcast, and provide them with the ability to distribute high-quality content that will engage friends. Remember to integrate Feed forms at the right points, and be sure to display meaningful and well-formatted content and action links in your Feed stories.

Feed Policy Update

To complement these product updates, we revised the Feed rules to reflect the principles outlined above. New policy elements include:

• All Feed publishing methods are now explicitly covered (including users.setStatus and status.set).
• Content sent via methods requiring extended permissions (such as status updates) or the user_message parameter must be user-generated.
• Any call to action in a Feed story must be formatted into an action link, similar to the Comment and Like links below the body of a story.

Please check out the complete Feed policy on our Developer Wiki.

We hope these rules will guide you in publishing stories that will be interesting to users and increase their trust in Platform. The updated Feed policy goes into effect on Monday April 20, 2009 at noon Pacific time. However, we may ask you to make changes sooner if we receive user reports about your application.

Let us know what you think in our Developer Forum. Or if you have a question you need to ask privately, please reach out using our Developer Help Contact Form.

We'll continue improving the stream to offer you valuable distribution while giving Facebook users greater control over the content they want to see. By focusing on the user experience, you should benefit from increased interaction, as many developers have already seen.

Guest post by entrepreneur and blogger Clara Shih, who is speaking at Harvard Business School and Web 2.0 Expo this week for the launch of her new book, The Facebook Era: Tapping Online Social Networks to Build Better Products, Reach New Audiences, and Sell More Stuff (Prentice Hall).

As individual users, we all experience and appreciate Facebook very viscerally -- sharing a photo, wishing someone a happy birthday. As developers and entrepreneurs, we may experience Facebook more tactically, continually optimizing based on new features that become available. What I spent the last year writing about in The Facebook Era is articulating why Facebook is so universally appealing and how it is transforming our culture, behavior, and relationships -- both between individuals as well as between companies and individuals. My hope is with a common language for us to describe these profound changes taking place that we as a developer community can be more strategic about the kinds of applications and businesses we build for this vibrant Facebook ecosystem.

For starters, I challenge you to think about a couple things:

• Business applications on Facebook. What happens when you bring the power of the social graph to business? I developed Faceforce (now called Faceconnector), an integration between Facebook profiles and Salesforce CRM, in 2007 because I realized that Facebook is CRM for 200 million people around the world. But Faceforce is just the tip of the iceberg. Every business interaction comes down to people - their relationships, their motivations, and mutual trust. Last November, Dave Morin and I collaborated on Force.com for Facebook to make it easier for Facebook developers to access enterprise infrastructure and audiences. What will you build?
  
• Trusted identity and the World Wide Web of people. The last decade was about the World Wide Web of information. Today, a World Wide Web of people is emerging, and we are all experiencing the power of trusted online identity and a ubiquitous social graph. With technologies like Facebook Connect, individuals can choose to bring aspects of their identity and friend graph with them to different websites and Web applications. For example, on The Facebook Era website, we have used Facebook Connect to make it easy for people to comment and share with their friends. We also use Connect as a security measure to verify identity when readers are claiming their Facebook ad credit. Purchase of the book (which costs $25) comes with a $25 credit, and we needed to make sure people weren't gaming the system. What do identity and social graph information mean for your application, and where is it appropriate - versus intrusive - to incorporate?

Of course, there are many more issues beyond these which we need to be thinking about. I look forward to hearing your thoughts - and invite you to participate via Facebook Connect on the book's website (and on the Facebook Platform Page). I started out wanting to write a book about business and technology -- The Facebook Era is both of those, but it's also about a sociocultural transformation. Similarly, as developers we cannot be successful thinking only about business and technology - we have to understand the people using our applications and how their behavior and preferences are changing.

In 2007, Clara -- with Facebook engineer Todd Perry's help -- developed Faceforce (now called Faceconnector), an application that integrates Facebook profiles and social graph data into Salesforce CRM, as a weekend project. Clara is currently Director of Social Networking Alliances and Product Strategy at salesforce.com, inc. and blogs at thefacebookera.com.

The Facebook Developer Garage program has been growing fast and furiously through the first three months of 2009. We’ve reached developers across the world, in communities ranging from the established to the emerging, and experienced many firsts.

We're celebrating March as a milestone, as we hosted nine developer Garages worldwide --- more than ever before in a single month. Facebook Developer Garages serve as a forum for developers to learn about the latest updates on Facebook Platform, share ideas and connect.

Over 150 people attended the first Facebook Developer Garage Ireland, which focused on Facebook Connect, Mobile, and building Silverlight applications for Facebook. The Garage made national news with Colm Long from Facebook’s Ireland office closing the event with a few remarks about the importance developer communities have on the Facebook Platform ecosystem.

The Facebook Developer Garage Bulgaria was also the first of its kind in its nation. The Developer Garage boasted over 70 developers who learned more about Facebook Platform, the basics of Facebook Connect, and the advantages Facebook can provide for developers, marketing specialists, and business owners.

In Philadelphia, heavy hitters in the industry were in attendance at the Facebook Garage Philadelphia, which drew over 150 developers, brands, and ad agencies. Attendees learned about application development, engagement for brand pages, and monetization concepts. Sasha Rush from the Platform team also gave a technical overview of Facebook Connect.

Facebook Developer Garage Pensacola, Florida, explored developer basics and the new design changes. Attendees learned about the FBML Basics and Page creation with Facebook's Jon Fougner video conferencing into the event.

Over 50 developers gathered together in Chennai, India, for the first Developer Garage in their locale. Topics focused on Facebook Connect, Facebook Connect for the iPhone, and how United Nations used Facebook in their Nuclear Disarmament campaign.

On March 15, the Facebook team trekked down south to Texas to rally developers at the Facebook Developer Garage Austin – SXSW Edition. Over 300 developers discussed Facebook Connect and had the first peek at newly launched Facebook Connect for the iPhone implementations. Facebook's Josh Elman gave an overview of Facebook Connect followed by presentations from Alamofire, Drop.io, Causes, Citizen Sports, and Flixster.

Later, one of our fbFund recipients, Kontagent, hosted a Facebook Developer Garage San Francisco. The event drew one of the largest crowds of the month with over 500 developers gathering to discuss Facebook Connect, Metrics, and Social Gaming, and Josh Elman emphasized the new abilities of the Facebook stream and feed forms.

Traveling over to Southeast Asia, Facebook Developer Garage Indonesia sparked interest among Indonesian Facebook enthusiasts. With over 300 developers, Indonesian developers shared insights from a user perspective and discussed the benefits of building on Facebook Platform and Facebook Connect. Facebook's Dave Morin and the Platform team helped kick off the event with a video sent from Facebook HQ.

The Facebook Developer Garage Paris closed the month with a small Garage connecting Parisian developers with marketers in the area. They shared their latest apps and mingled over tasty treats.

To learn more about the Garage program, please see our Developer Wiki or find Garages near you on our Calendar. We hope to see a Garage near you soon!

*Special thanks to our Garage hosts: Kontagent, Facebook Developers Indonesia, FreSh!, Think.Web, Brand Science Institute, Alamofire, Stormy Shippy, The Knowledge Foundation, Social Media Group, Business Blogging, Facebook Developers Garage – Florida, Stuzo Group, Facebook Developers Bulgaria, and web2ireland

*Thanks also to Intel who sponsored our Developer Garage Ireland, Austin and San Francisco.