Facebook Developers

Accelerate. Revise. Iterate. Revolutionize.

These words describe the spirit behind fbFund REV 2009, our new startup incubator program for social websites, applications, and platforms. Eighteen startups, two non-profits, top Facebook Developers, veteran entrepreneurs, and angel investors will take part in an intense and exciting ten-week journey this summer under one roof at one of our Facebook offices in Palo Alto, California.

We expect this summer to be filled with innovation, community-building, and fun. Dave McClure will make sure the fun part is covered.

Already planned are sessions with speakers from our fbFund Advisory Council, business luminaries, and our Facebook Platform team focused on everything from operating lean startups and metrics for success to marketing and monetization. The days will be packed with opportunities to get together, learn from one another, brainstorm and iterate on applications and business models. At the end of the summer, all of the startups will present to Silicon Valley angel and venture capital investors to get feedback and explore investment opportunities.

Over 400 developers and entrepreneurs from around the world applied for this round of funding. Thank you to every team that submitted. The 400+ submissions were narrowed to the top fifty finalists and finally, to eighteen startups and two non-profits. We invited more than twenty of our fbFund Council advisors and investors to help us review, rate, interview, and select the finalists. We are excited to see many businesses using Facebook Connect as well as several engaging new Platform apps make their way onto the list of finalists. The diverse start-ups range from fashion, religion and resident referrals to gaming, communication, matchmaking and photos sharing, music, events and travel. These current recipients will receive over US$500,000 in funding this round. Without further delay, here are the companies that will be joining us for fbFund REV 2009:

Startups (in alphabetical order)

• Frintro: Find friends of friends to date...or play matchmaker! If you're single, you can search your friends' friends and ask for intros. If you're taken, you can set friends up. Friends of friends are the best people to date. It's social dating via friendly intros.
• Funji: Funji is an avatar-based social networking app for the iPhone and iPod touch, satisfying users' desire to express themselves and communicate with others in a fun, creative way. The team has more than five years of experience in the mobile market in both South Korea and the US.
• Gameyola: Gameyola is a distribution and monetization platform for casual Flash games. Flash games currently monetize poorly, but Gameyola solves this problem by providing Flash developers tools to sell virtual goods and to acquire users through social channels.
• Life360 (private beta): From keeping track of your kids to protecting your identity and getting back your lost stuff, Life360 is the place you go to keep your family safe, secure, and prepared for daily life.
• MyChurch.org: Churches create their own social networks on MyChurch.org. They extend their community between Sundays with tools to connect and engage their members. Over 30,000 church congregations are represented on MyChurch.org.
• Navify: Navify is a visual encyclopedia that combines Wikipedia articles with images, videos, and comments. It is the only general encyclopedia that allows you to listen to music videos, watch movie trailers, and browse news and celebrity photo galleries.
• Nutshell Mail: Simplify the way you manage Facebook and other social networks. NutshellMail consolidates activity from all your accounts into a single email digest delivered on your schedule. Don't let email alerts clutter your inbox. Get informed, not interrupted. Get the Nut!
• Networked Blogs: Bring your blog to Facebook, and Facebook to your blog. Pull your Feed to your profile and business pages, add widgets to promote your network, and read the news from blogs you follow on the largest community of bloggers and blog lovers on Facebook.
• Paradise Paintball 3D: Paradise Paintball is the first game developed on Cmune's next-generation social gaming platform. It is the first casual, 3D multiplayer FPS game on Facebook, Apple Dashboard, and Mac and PC. Play with up to eight friends and buy virtual items to enhance the gameplay.
• Photos I Like: Photos I Like is a digital media sharing and discovery site emphasizing lightweight social content, self-expression, and communities.
• RentMineOnline: Combines the success of resident referral programs with the power of social networks. Residents refer their community to friends through social networks like Facebook, and email to earn rewards and live with friends.
• RUNmyERRAND: RUNmyERRAND is a social networking inspired web and mobile marketplace that provides people and businesses an easy and trusted way to get everyday tasks done in their own hyperlocal community.
• RunThere: RunThere is a social-networking service for runners and cyclists. Users can map and measure their favorite routes (no GPS required), keep a running/biking log, and find athletes and routes nearby
• Sortuv: Sortuv lets you start with something you like, and discover more. Instead of searching for a "great restaurant" just say what you mean: "Find me a place sortuv like Spago in Seattle". Check them out on the Web, on the iPhone, and on Facebook.
• TravelBrain/GeckoGo: Travel Brain by GeckoGo helps you track (and show off!) your travels, share experiences with others, and discover new places to visit. Learn from the knowledge of over 600,000 travelers, and get expert guide info from their Bradt Travel Guides partnership.
• Weardrobe (private beta): Weardrobe is a fashion-focused community for discovering different ways to wear clothing. Weardrobe provides a platform for people to share reviews of their own clothing, post photos of their looks, catalog their closet and search for style inspiration.
• Workstir: Workstir is a community that connects users with trustworthy local service providers. Anyone can post a job and choose a provider with confidence by browsing their past reviews. For businesses, Workstir provides a wealth of jobs in their area of expertise.
• Worldly Developments (private beta): Worldly Developments is building online services that will help you connect with the people, places and events in your local community. Its first product makes it a snap to plan, promote, and communicate around group activities.

Non-profits*

• Samasource: Sama is Sanskrit for "equal" – Samasource finds and trains reliable QA professionals to test Facebook apps with a user-friendly interface that lives on Facebook Platform. With Samasource, developers lower costs, reduce poverty, and improve their applications.
• Vittana: Vittana enables you to lend directly to students in the developing world, $25 at a time. Their mission is to bring student loans to the developing world through the power of person-to-person microlending.

Stay tuned for updates throughout the summer by becoming a fan of fbFund. Our team is really revved up about REV 2009!

Interested in Applying for the Next fbFund Round?

We're just getting started. fbFund is a $10M seed fund created by Facebook, Accel Partners, and Founders Fund to help enable talented developers and entrepreneurs to build sustainable businesses on Facebook Platform. fbFund will continue to invest seed funding and mentoring resources on talented entrepreneurs/developers building on Facebook Platform or using Facebook Connect. Keep posted for updates in Q4 2009 on how to apply.

*Due to the way fbFund is structured, the non-profit startups cannot receive funding, but will attend and take part in the incubator program.

A big part of Facebook Platform and Connect has always been mentoring and inspiring entrepreneurs to build new experiences using the power of the social graph. Here on the Facebook Platform team we spend a lot of time with entrepreneurs from all over the world helping them get the resources, education, and inspiration they need to build social applications that Facebook users will love.

Today, we're headed to Boulder as part of an up and coming incubator program called TechStars. Over the last several years, the Boulder startup community has grown to over 100 startups, and TechStars is the hub of the action. Founders Brad Feld and David Cohen have asked me to join the program as a mentor to provide guidance to this year's round of entrepreneurs as they look to leverage Facebook Platform technologies to get their businesses off the ground.

We are excited to lend our full support to TechStars and the Colorado startup community. Throughout the day Friday I’ll work with TechStars startups and hashing through the big problems they are facing and how the social graph can help. Friday night we’ll host an official Facebook Developer Garage Boulder.

It is exciting to see a flourishing technology startup community in Boulder. If you are part of the TechStars program, see you tomorrow. If not, and you are located in the Denver/Boulder area, please join us for Facebook Developer Garage Boulder tomorrow night. Here are the details:

• Facebook Developer Garage Boulder
• Date: Friday, May 22, 2009
• Time: 6:00pm - 9:00pm
• Location: Tech Stars Office
• Boulder, CO

See you there!

We are excited to announce our inaugural set of 120 Verified Apps to Facebook users! We opened the program to interested developers several months ago and have been overwhelmed by the positive response and passion of these early participants. Our Application Verification Program gives you an opportunity to demonstrate your commitment to providing trustworthy user experiences in your applications. Users of Verified Apps can feel confident that these applications strive to be transparent about how they work and respect social expectations between friends.

Users can easily find Verified Apps in our new Application Directory, which also launches today. As a Verified App, you'll benefit from the following:

1. Badging in the Application Directory: Users will see a green "verified" check mark next to your application name wherever it is listed.
   
2. Priority ranking in the Application Directory: When appropriate, Verified Apps will appear before any applications that have not been verified yet.
3. Badging on your application profile: On this page, users will see the official "Facebook Verified App" graphic in the left column.
   
4. Allocation boosts: You will also receive a two-bucket boost in both notification and requests allocations. You can see your application's allocation buckets on the Allocations tab on the Insights page. These allocations will continue to be subject to our algorithmic reputation system which looks at various metrics and user signals.
   
5. Ad credits and discounts: You will receive $100 in credit to advertize with Facebook and discounts to Facebook events.

To help users discover well-designed and useful applications, our new Application Directory now also contains a "Featured by Facebook" section. This section will spotlight various Verified Apps, editorially selected by the Facebook team. We'll update this section on a regular basis to provide users with an additional channel to discover interesting applications.

We will continue to educate users about the power and value of social applications. Take a look at our first video which captures why friends make all the difference:

Facebook Platform continues to be open and available to any developer who wants to build applications without barriers to entry. The Application Verification Program gives you an additional option for engaging users. If you are interested in participating, navigate to your application in the Developer application, and click the Submit Application for Verification link.

If you have any questions, feel free to voice them in our forums. You can also read more details about the verification process and requirements on our Developer site.

In continuing with our efforts toward greater openness, we are excited to announce that Facebook is now an OpenID relying party. We've been engaging with the OpenID community for a while now. We'll be the largest relying party so far and look forward to contributing back to the community what we learned about how OpenID works with a complex and changing user base.

Over the past several months, we've taken a number of steps that help to build a scalable, secure, and sustainable framework, one that further defines what it means to be an OpenID relying party.

We believe openness and open standards foster a strong developer community with shared goals and interests. So, Facebook joined the OpenID Foundation Board in February of this year.

We've always believed that making the user experience as secure, lightweight, and intuitive as possible, which 200 million people can comfortably enjoy and understand, is one of our top priorities. In the spirit of helping craft a simple and safe login flow for OpenID, we hosted the OpenID User Experience Summit, where we shared lessons learned from developing the Facebook Connect authentication system.

We're also concerned with account security. Again, we shared our experience developing Facebook Connect, where we eventually came up with a design that ensures that users would know that they were providing their login credentials to Facebook, and not some unscrupulous site. We streamlined the OpenID login process while maintaining security, converting the full-page redirect to a pop-up. We worked with the community to develop this pop-up extension to standardize the more streamlined user experience.

We've always let our users express their real world connections. From the beginning, Facebook users could use their college and workplace identities to establish real world networks. Now, they can also use open standards to establish their identities on Facebook.

These are the first steps of many in working with the OpenID community.

Now, users can register for Facebook using their Gmail accounts. This is a quicker, more streamlined way for new users to register for the site, find their friends, and start exploring.

Existing and new users can now link their Facebook accounts with their Gmail accounts or with accounts from those OpenID providers that support automatic login. Once a user links his or her account with a Gmail address or an OpenID URL, logs in to that account, then goes to Facebook, that user will already be logged in to Facebook.

In tests we've run, we've noticed that first-time users who register on the site with OpenID are more likely to become active Facebook users. They get up and running after registering even faster than before, find their friends easily, and quickly engage on the site.

We welcome your feedback on the Developer Forum. And you can read the technical requirements on the Developer Wiki.

We'll keep working on the OpenID experience to make it even better for new and existing users. And we'll continue to work with the OpenID community and others on advancing openness on the Web.

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

Alright folks, the votes are in! The Academy... er, i mean the fbFund team has spent the last month reviewing ~400 submissions for the fbFund 2009 Incubator program. Now we're ready to announce the first 25 of our 50 finalists (& we'll announce the second group of 25 soon, as well as our eventual Incubator winners and fbFund investments).

Different from previous fbFund funding cycles, this time around we invited more than 20 of our Developer Council advisors and investors to help us review, rate, interview, & select the finalists. We spent many a late night in April & May toiling over hot laptops, reading executive summaries, reviewing powerpoint presentations, watching video pitches (both good and bad -- some of you should NOT be on YouTube), and even calling a few of the most amazing companies & developers to make sure they weren't droids in disguise. At the end, we had a tough time figuring out which teams building Facebook apps, Facebook Connect websites, and iPhone apps would make the cut and which would not. However when in doubt, we simply consulted the Mighty Magic 8-Ball for insight & inspiration (NOT!).

So with no further ado, we'd like to announce our first 25 fbFund 2009 Finalists:

• Connect sites: Frintro, GovIt, RunMyErrand, RentMineOnline, MyChurch.org, GreetBeatz, Workstir, NutshellMail, RunThere, DropPlay, Magellan (private beta), Life360 (private beta), Vittana (private beta)
• Platform apps: Travel Brain, Networked Blogs, Gameyola, Photos I Like, Paradise Paintball 3D, Veechi Classes, BitStrips (private beta), SamaSource
• iPhone apps: FriendFreak, Near+Now (Sortuv), Paparazzi, CrazyMenu

Select finalist descriptions:

• Frintro: Play matchmaker to help your single friends find friends of friends to date! Think social dating via "friendly introductions."
• RentMineOnline: Combines the success of resident referral programs with the power of social networks. Residents refer their community to friends through Facebook to earn rewards and live with friends.
• Travel Brain & GeckoGo.com: Play the Travel Brain app on Facebook to choose your favorite travel spots; then search travel reviews on GeckoGo.com
• FriendFreak: Play a fun and social iPhone app to learn more about all your Facebook friends

Congratulations to all of the first 25 finalists, and much thanks to everyone who applied to the program.

Next up we'll be announcing our second group of 25 finalists, and then from among the 50 finalists we'll reveal the winning Incubator apps and startups. The winners will be offered the opportunity to participate in our summer Incubator program, and we'll also be providing seed investments of up to $100,000 (note: no longer grants). Our 10-week program will begin in mid-June and go thru end of August in Silicon Valley, and will be housed at one of the former Facebook offices in downtown Palo Alto. Throughout the summer, we'll be inviting mentors and advisors from Facebook and over 20 top development companies and startup investors to help our Incubator startups grow up from Paduans to Jedis.

And remember young Jedi... there is no try, only DO!

In the nearly two years since Facebook Platform opened to developers, over 52,000 applications have gone live in the Application Directory. Ensuring that applications are trustworthy, meaningful (whether for entertainment or utility value), and easy to find is paramount to developer success, user engagement, and helping the ecosystem as whole to thrive. Today, with applications of all types – on Facebook, Facebook Connect websites, mobile and desktop applications – the need for a centralized and efficient directory is growing. As part of our latest steps toward improving application discovery, we'll be launching a new Application Directory and the inaugural Verified Applications, in the coming weeks. This new directory will include several features including:

• Improved Categories: We designed the existing categories before Platform launched in 2007. It's time for a refreshed list that more accurately represents the diversity of social applications.
• Updated application Profile Pages: We are updating application About Pages to look like public Profile Pages. This includes the tabbed structure of the profile that will enable you to communicate to fans of your Profile Page in their News Feed, making it easier for you to send out updates on the latest application and community news, such as events, videos, and photos.
• Visibility for Verified Apps: With the new Application Directory, you'll also see the first of Facebook Platform's Verified Apps. These apps will be prioritized higher in the directory and will appear alongside a green check mark in the directory and a verified badge on the application's new Profile Page.
• Stream of Application Stories: On the homepage of the new directory, users will see a stream of stories that their friends are generating from applications. This stream will expose applications in a socially-relevant way and help the millions of users who visit the Application Directory each month stay updated with their friends' activity on Facebook. The stream serves as another channel for application discovery, allowing -- for the first time -- users to see what applications their friends use alongside editorial picks.

Getting Your Application Ready

You can take a few steps now to get ready for these launches:

1. Update your category and subcategory selections for your application. Navigate to your application in the Developer application and click the Edit About Page link. Then click the Application Information section, update your category selections and save.
2. Update your application's new Profile Page. Navigate to your application's current About Page and change the domain to http://www.beta.facebook.com. Click the Edit Application link and change how users will see your page. When we launch the new application Profile Pages, all users will see the new design at the same time.
3. Submit your application to the Application Verification Program, so it's included in the early waves of the Verified Apps that will get added after we launch. In the Developer application, navigate to your application and click the Submit Application for Verification link.
   (Note: The application form will go live at 5:00PM Pacific time.)

If you have any questions, ask them in our special forums. We hope you are as excited as we are for these changes!

The Publisher is a great way for your users to interact with your application, sharing content directly on their friends' profiles as well as posting content to their own profiles. And now, we've updated the Publisher so your applications' Publisher integrations work on Facebook Pages as well. This allows Page admins and to publish content directly to users' streams through your Publisher on the Page. And that Page's fans can publish content directly on a Page through your Publisher, where those posts then get published into their streams for their friends and other fans to see.

We can think of a number of ways in which your applications can maximize their impact on Facebook Pages. And given the high level of creativity of our developer community, we know you'll think of many more ways. For example, your application can use the Publisher on a Page to:

• Promote philanthropy, coupons, or sweepstakes. A Page admin can solicit a charitable donation, publish a coupon, or announce a sweepstakes, and the resulting post appears in the streams of its fans, driving traffic to an appropriate tab on the Page or an external site.
• Gauge fan interest. Polling applications are a good way for a band or brand to gather information from its fans.
• Encourage fan interaction. The many artistic applications out there can give fans the ability to create works of art directly on a Page to show their appreciation.
• Host live events. Bands, brands, and public figures all want to interact with their fans and supporters in real time. Use the Publisher to announce a live event and drive traffic to the event.

What Do I Need to Do?

If you already have a Publisher integration, it will work for Page admins and fans viewing the Page in exactly the same way it works for user profile owners and friends viewing a user's profile. You should keep in mind the following:

• Make sure your application can be added to a Page. In the Facebook Developer application, on the Authentication tab, check Facebook Pages next to Installable to?.
• Look for the fb_sig_page_id parameter we'll send to your application so you know it's being requested from a Page. This is useful if you want to customize the Publisher for different contexts.
• Configure your Publisher to be fluid, so it runs inline on the Facebook home page, user profiles, and Facebook Pages.
• A profile box or application tab must be on the Page before the Publisher can appear, so having a rich, engaging tab or box helps. For inspiration, check out the New Tees! tab on the Threadless Page or Target's Vote tab.
• Use the Open Stream API to read from and write to a user's stream.

We've updated our sample application, Smiley, so you can try out its Publisher on a Facebook Page.

As always, we welcome your feedback in the Developer Forum. We can't wait to see what kinds of Publishers you'll make available to public figures, brands, and bands on Facebook!

Facebook Platform developers are an active and critical part of making the Facebook experience rich and engaging, and the Platform team is working hard to give our developers improved support. We've listened to your feedback on our Wiki, our Forum, our Platform Page, and from direct conversations to discover the areas you want us to refine. We welcome all of our developers now to contribute by completing our new monthly survey and also by adding your input in our new feedback center.

The survey is our way to understand how the Platform team is doing in specific areas. We'll incorporate feedback from the survey and work alongside the community to make improvements.

The feedback center allows our developer community to submit and vote on ideas for improving the developer experience - in particular, our documentation and articles. We're looking for ways to surface the most relevant information (for example, what are the best practices for creating Feed stories, or how should I best handle a returning user with Facebook Connect). Write in with what you are most interested in learning more about. We're still taking feature requests on Bugzilla and listening to your comments in the Forum, but the new feedback system will be an easy way for developers to see and vote on the most important issues in the community. We'll follow the feedback closely and join the conversation.

These are both great ways to let us know what areas you'd like to see support for Facebook Platform improve, so be as detailed, specific, and thoughtful as you can. We'll do our best to implement your best suggestions as we make improvements to our Developer Site.

We look forward to hearing from you! Don't forget to take the survey to give us your feedback.

Next week, we'll be in Denver to join a great group of speakers and panelists at the Glue Conference, an event dedicated to solving the Web application integration problem-set. This year's theme is the Web's move toward a more interconnected platform across services, enterprise, and social graphs.

On Tuesday morning, our very own Josh Elman will be kicking off Glue in his talk about connecting the Web through allowing people to bring their identity and social graph with them. Dave McClure,startup investor and fbFund 2009 Incubator Program manager, will be joining Josh on Wednesday to speak on a panel entitled, "Unlocking the Social Graph – What Does That Mean Exactly?"

If you'll be in Denver, or want to head out for a great couple of days next week, you can still register at http://www.gluecon.eventbrite.com/. You can also save $100 with the code, "spkr09." Once you've registered, don't forget to share the event with your friends via Eventbrite's Facebook Connect integration.

Since Facebook Connect launched in December 2008, over 8,000 websites, mobile applications and desktop clients have integrated the service. We've seen sites based around everything from photos to blogs to events all implement Connect to increase engagement, reach new users, and become even more social. Today, we are excited to share that Digg is the latest to integrate Facebook Connect, making it easier for users to sign into the social news site, find friends, and share actions with their friends via Facebook.

Starting today, existing Digg users can benefit from a single sign-on by logging into the site with their Facebook account and confirming their Digg profile. New users can also register using their Facebook account and invite their friends to join. Users can interact with their friends who are also on the site, and share the stories they "digg," comment on, and submit, with all their friends back on Facebook. Finding stories on Digg gets even more interesting when you can see what your friends are doing, as well as the broader community. Just as with other Connect implementations, actions posted to a user's Facebook profile will appear in their friends' streams, and their friends can follow links back to Digg, furthering the cycle of sharing and discovery across the Web.

Friends and collaborative distribution make any experience more valuable, including those are inherently social, like video and music sharing, shopping, and watching TV. Here are some of the latest sites that have implemented Facebook Connect to allow users to bring their friends along with them:

• CBS.com: As the first broadcast network to implement Facebook Connect, CBS.com now allows you to share your favorite shows back to your Facebook stream. You can even alert friends when you're viewing shows so that they can join you back on CBS.com to watch and chat about "How I Met Your Mother," "The Big Bang Theory," and other CBS hits, together.
• Qik: Streaming video from your cell phone and sharing with friends has never been easier, thanks to Qik's new Facebook Connect integration. The mobile streaming service recently added Connect to its set of features to allow users to share uploaded videos and those commented on with friends, as well as alert them when new video is being streamed, so that they can join the user back on Qik.com. Since integrating with Facebook Connect, new user registrations on Qik have gone up 20 percent. Additionally, thousands of users are already using the Facebook Connect integration to sign up and upload multiple thousands of videos to Facebook from their mobile devices.
• Shopseen: Shopseen is a site that unearths unique fashion finds in local stores near you. By integrating Facebook Connect, the site now enables visitors to share specific pieces of clothing, shoes, and accessories with their Facebook friends, allowing for new discovery of local businesses and trusted referrals among friends.
• Songza: Chances are that you and many of your friends have similar taste in music, which is a concept that Songza identified in 2007 when it launched as a music sharing, streaming, and search site. They've recently taken their sharing to new heights with the addition of Facebook Connect, allowing users to sign in with their Facebook identity and share full tracks and music videos back to their streams each time they add a new song to their playlist. Since integrating Facebook Connect, Songza's referral traffic is up 313 percent and the average session length of a Facebook visit has increased from almost 27 minutes to over 39 minutes.
• Geni: Finding and connecting with your family on Geni.com got even easier since Geni integrated Facebook Connect. Once you connect on Geni, it's really easy to find and invite your family to build up your family tree. Users who have connected their Facebook accounts have sent 153% more invitations to their family members than users who haven't.

As more sites add the power of authentic identity, sharing and the social graph, we look forward to people across the Web finding social value in the things that matter to them most.

After receiving input from the community and holding a vote, we recently put into place the new Facebook Principles and Statement of Rights and Responsibilities (SRR), which serve as the foundation for the relationship between Facebook and our users, advertisers, and developers. The SRR replaces the Developer Terms of Service (and other documents), and we hope you find the new plain English format easier to read and understand.

In the spirit of keeping things simple, we reorganized the Platform Guidelines to make it easier for you to find what you're looking for. We also rolled together into that single document several sets of developer policies that were spread out among the Developer Wiki main policy page, the Facebook Connect policy page, and other places. Going forward, this new version of the Platform Guidelines and the SRR are the only policy documents that will apply to developers and applications.

The new Guidelines document has almost the same content as the previous version of the policies. The few changes we made were primarily to accommodate product changes, eliminate redundancy, and clarify ambiguities. For example, we clarified that user data you get from the API is always subject to the restrictions on storage (so you shouldn't pre-fill data in a form for users to submit to your application if you plan to store that data; users should enter that information directly). But the caching restrictions have been modified to allow for retaining user data you get from Facebook beyond 24 hours in certain offline situations. And we more clearly explained the policy around use of Facebook’s product terms and trademarks.

Our policies are designed to help create a thriving ecosystem for developers and ensure a great experience for every user who interacts with Facebook or applications on or off Facebook. Over time we hope to take additional steps to improve policy and provide you with assistance in achieving success and building the best possible user experience.

The new version of the Platform Guidelines goes into effect Tuesday 12 May 2009 at noon Pacific time. If you have questions or comments we’d love to hear from you in the Developer Forum. For private matters please feel free to reach out to us directly via our Developer Help Contact Form.

Throughout April, we've been excited to share a mixture of Facebook Platform developer events with our community.

To coincide with the launch of the Open Stream API, Facebook hosted a Technology Tasting event at our headquarters in Palo Alto, California. Developers and entrepreneurs stopped by to hear us discuss the Open Stream API, and some of them demonstrated their own initial implementations. We also revealed more of our openness initiatives while enjoying delicious food and fine local wines.

Meanwhile, the Facebook Developer Garage program had an international focus this month, with four Garages hosted throughout Europe and Asia. The Facebook Developer Garage program serves as a forum to share information and ideas among developers and build together using Facebook Platform.

Over 100 developers gathered for the Facebook Developer Garage London, which focused on monetization. They listened to a panel of advertising representatives present the benefits and diverse choices across the advertising spectrum on Facebook. Facebook Connect for iPhone was also a popular topic with Playfish presenting how they had built their iPhone integration.

At the Facebook Developer Garage Barcelona, over 200 Facebook developers connected online and offline to learn about the technical aspects of building a Facebook Connect implementation. Facebook’s Brent Goldman led these sessions in tandem with Spanish developers. For those less technical in the room, Spanish developers organized a concurrent track focused on good user experience on Facebook Platform and Facebook Connect.

In nearby Milan, Italy, more than 250 developers welcomed Italy’s first Facebook Developer Garage. Facebook engineer, James Leszczenski, demonstrated the technical pieces used to create a Facebook Connect implementation. Italian developers also hacked together their own apps to participate in Italy’s App Contest.

To close the month, New Delhi hosted its second Facebook Developer Garage with over 75 developers gathering to discuss the theme of ‘Facebook in every walk of your life’. Facebook’s David Ellis and Ghassan Haddad shared details of internationalization on Facebook Platform. Filmmakers, brand managers, and media tycoons also presented their experiences of how Facebook and Facebook Platform have revolutionized communications in their work and life.

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

*Special thanks to our hosts Facebook Developer Garage London, Sclipo, Mikamai, Tekriti Software and our sponsor Intel.

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 April, 2009.

New Features

• Read from and write to users' streams directly with the Open Stream API.
• Try out Facebook for Adobe AIR, a desktop application built on Adobe AIR runtime.
• Use Facebook’s Adobe AIR client library with Facebook for Adobe AIR. The library lets you authenticate users with Facebook Connect from the AIR application, then interact with the Facebook REST server or with the ActionScript 3.0 Library for Facebook Platform.
• Improve your application's performance with quick transitions, which uses Ajax to quickly load FBML and IFrame canvas pages without loading the surrounding Facebook chrome.
• We now display a review form inline on your canvas pages to your application's most active users. The user can either review your application or ignore the form.
• Facebook Connect sites can provide a Connect Reclamation URL so you can contact a user in the event that user deactivates his or her Facebook account.

Updates

• You can now request a series of extended permissions at one time.
• Learn how we updated Feed policy to reflect new features like the Open Stream API.
• Now that the Publisher appears on the Facebook home page, we improved it and suggest how you can design it.

Announcements

• As a reminder, in the very near future, we will be rolling out 64 bit user IDs. We encourage you to test your applications by going to www.facebook.com/r.php?force_64bit and create test accounts with 64 bit UIDs.

Articles/Videos

• Tune in to the Technology Tasting event Facebook hosted to discuss the Open Stream API, OpenID, and more.
• Dave McClure of Founders Fund invites you to apply for the fbFund 20009 Incubator Program.
• Clara Shih, entrepreneur and blogger, helps us understand the Facebook Era.

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.