Facebook Developers

With over 950,000 developers using Facebook Platform to build applications that engage millions of users every day, we are focused on making the developer experience as positive as possible. 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 July, 2009.

New Features

• Encourage visitors to your website to become fans on your Facebook Page with the Fan Box, a Facebook Connect social widget.
• Render Facebook Connect features in other languages so you can provide your users with a consistent and seamless user experience.
• Target your Facebook ads to people who have never used your applications to find new users or to existing users of your applications to encourage repeat visits.
• We released a beta API method, intl.getTranslations which can retrieve the native strings, their translations, and each translation’s approval status and approver.

Updates

• So we can provide developers with a faster and more reliable code base, as well as a more robust environment where you can build your applications, we've started refactoring Facebook Platform code. You don't have to modify any of your code to account for the refactoring. We'll keep a running list of API methods as they get refactored. We hope to complete this process by mid-September.
• With our growth to over 250 million users making geographic networks obsolete, we're deprecating regional networks September 30, 2009. After that date, calls to users.getInfo or queries on the user FQL table, won't return regional networks for affiliations; we will still return corporate and educational networks though.
• Following up on the launch of usernames, the user, page, and profile FQL tables now contain the indexable field username. Additionally, the url field in those tables now returns the URL containing the username.
• If you installed a Fan Box on your website, you can reference your own CSS so you can style it.
• We deprecated the Publisher Mode setting in the application settings editor as well as the admin.getAppProperties and admin.setAppProperties. Publisher integrations that were configured for the legacy/wide setting now appear inline. For help creating a fluid layout, see this blog post from April.
• You can now choose between giving your users an email address or a URL for them to follow when they want to contact you for application support. Visit your application's settings page in the Developer app to check it out.

Announcements

• As of July 15th, 250 million people are using Facebook to stay updated on what's happening around them and share with the people in their lives. We couldn't have done it without you, developers.
• Familiarize yourself with the new advertising guidelines, which take effect August 3, 2009.
• Share your thoughts and experiences developing your Facebook Connect integration in this survey.
• We started testing new privacy settings with a small percentage of users.
• Using Facebook's Live Stream Box, people viewed the Michael Jackson memorial service on their favorite website – CNN, E! Online, ABC or MTV – and participated in the conversation about it with their Facebook friends or others watching around the world. Facebook has become a central place to view the news about Michael Jackson and share in a tribute to his life and the mourning of his death. There were a total of about 1 million users posting approximately 800,000 status updates on Facebook related to the live online broadcasts by CNN, E! Online, ABC and MTV of the Michael Jackson memorial service.

Articles/Videos

• Read The Facebook Doctrine: Gaming And The Future feature in Gamasutra magazine.

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.

We are always interested in hearing from developers and entrepreneurs about their experiences with Facebook Connect. Since the launch of Facebook Connect in December, 2008, more than 15,000 Facebook Connect implementations have gone live around the world. We continue to be impressed by the innovative ways developers deploy Connect, such as those highlighted in this recent Mashable article.

Whether you’re in the beginning stages of a Facebook Connect integration, or have been working on one for months, we’d love to hear from you. Please share your thoughts and experiences with us by filling out this quick survey. We may contact you to ask if we can feature you in a case study or press opportunities, or publish your experiences on the Facebook Connect Page.

For additional news on Facebook Connect, please become a fan of the Facebook Connect Page.

Facebook Platform has come a long way in the two years since its launch. What started out as a small collection of API methods allowing our developers to integrate some user information into their applications has evolved into a comprehensive set of tools and products that have enabled you to create hundreds of thousands of innovative, engaging experiences on Facebook and across the Web.

We strongly value Platform quality and performance. As Platform has evolved and its code base become more complex, we need to make sure that it performs robustly so that your applications continue to deliver rewarding experiences to users. To do this, as we announced last night, we're undertaking our first major refactoring of Facebook Platform code. Our goal is to provide you with a faster and more reliable code base, as well as a more robust environment where you can build your applications. This process will continue throughout the upcoming weeks, and we intend to complete the refactoring in mid-September.

You don't have to modify anything in your applications and sites to accommodate these changes. All of these changes are happening on our back end, here at Facebook. As we modify the code, we'll verify it against our suite of unit tests before we release the code publicly. We built these unit tests to validate new code before it gets pushed. Once a given set of code is ready, we'll roll it out during our weekly push cycle, which happens on Tuesday nights, Pacific time.

You can keep track of which API methods we're updating each week on the Developer Wiki. If you notice any issues affecting your applications that you think are due to these changes, please file a bug.

We'll also keep a close eye on the Developer Forum and the #facebook IRC channel throughout this process, so please leave your feedback there. We hope you're as excited by these quality improvements as we are!

The Facebook Platform team is excited by the innovation we're seeing as developers create new ways to bring value to users. The canvas is yours to fill -- your direct connection to users for delivering the experience you design.

You're welcome to monetize that experience however you think best, whether through virtual goods, subscriptions, advertising, or whatever you choose. But ads work best when they provide users genuine value, respect their trust, and otherwise ensure the best possible user experience.

New Advertising Guidelines

To protect user experience and better guide developers and ad networks, today we're announcing that all ads within applications on Platform must comply with the Advertising Guidelines that Facebook enforces for its own ad system.

Please remember that developers have never been allowed to send user data received from Facebook to ad networks, and we take firm action against this. If you run code provided by an ad network in the operation of your application, be sure you understand what this code does.

Regardless of whether data is being sent to ad networks or not, ads that display user data are not allowed in Platform applications unless specifically approved by Facebook. This applies whether the user data is obtained directly from Facebook or otherwise, and whether the ad or data is rendered by an ad network or developer. We are exploring how we could enable such ads while meeting high standards of user experience, but for now no such ads are authorized.

A revision of the Advertising Guidelines that better accommodates Platform will be posted in the next day and is effective starting Monday 3 August 2009 at noon Pacific time.

Be Responsible for the Ads You Display

We consider advertising to be part of your application, and as such has been and will continue to be subject to the Statement of Rights and Responsibilities and the Platform Guidelines. We'd like to remind you that you are responsible for all content within your application, and will be held accountable for any policy violations in ads appearing in your application, regardless of whether you have served them or they come from a third-party ad network. Facebook will enforce against developers and applications that include policy-violating ads -- such as by imposing a temporary restriction on functionality or permanently disabling the application -- as we do for other instances of policy violation.

As we've discussed recently, when we see ads that undermine trust, abuse users, or otherwise violate policy, we take action to stop them. And in two recent cases we prohibited entire advertising networks from providing services to applications, because the networks weren't compliant with our policies and failed to correct their practices.

Improving the Ecosystem

Developer monetization and the cultivation of a thriving, diverse ecosystem are important to us. Ensuring that users are comfortable with ads engenders more engagement and monetization for developers, and more traffic for ad networks and their advertisers. With these steps we hope to improve the environment for all, as together we provide the best value for users and the best opportunities for everyone.

Questions?

Developers with questions are welcome to contact us via the Developer Help Contact Form. Ad networks and advertisers can reach us via the Platform Advertising Contact Form.

The Facebook website has been translated into 64 languages and locales over the past 18 months, with many more in progress. And Facebook Connect has been implemented on some 15,000 sites, devices, and applications worldwide since its December, 2008, launch. Now we're officially extending internationalization to the Facebook Connect features on those sites.

Developers who've implemented Facebook Connect, including those who have installed social widgets like the Fan Box, now have the ability to decide in which language they want their Facebook Connect features rendered. For example, Bild, Germany's largest newspaper and a Facebook Connect site, implemented this feature and now their site and Facebook Connect features both appear in German, and their users can enjoy a seamless and consistent user experience.

When a user first connects to your site, or publishes something back to Facebook, the Facebook Connect content will appear in the language you specify. User-generated content continues to appear in the language in which it was written.

It's simple to implement. All you need to do is append the locale of your choice to the FeatureLoader script. For example, if your site is written in Spanish for a Latin American audience, you could choose to have Facebook Connect features appear in Spanish like this:

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

Do this wherever you reference the FeatureLoader script. Otherwise, Facebook Connect defaults to the en_US (English/United States) locale.

We look forward to hearing any comments or questions you might have in the Developer Forum. International developers, get started with Facebook Connect here.

As Facebook Platform grows, so have the businesses of many of the developers finding success on Facebook Platform. From hiring teams to growing userbases and raising funding, developers around the world have turned their passions into profitable business. For example, in the past 18 months, Playfish launched eight games (seven of which have reached the Top 10 list), expanded to four offices around the world, grew to 35 million monthly active users across its applications, and is profitable. Similarly, Zynga continues to release new games to accompany Texas HoldEm Poker, the number one game on Facebook, with over 14 million monthly active users. The company is also growing, having gone from 45 to over 300 people in the past year, and currently has 90 job openings.

We are committed to helping you monetize your applications, and starting today we're offering new opportunities to help you reach the most relevant audiences. We continue to focus on two areas: helping you increase traffic to your applications, and enabling you to increase revenue from users who are engaged in the application experience.

Facebook offers many ways to help you reach new and existing users, including requests, stream stories, application bookmarks and the Application Directory. In addition, many developers have found that advertising on Facebook can meaningfully boost these organic distribution channels. In the process, they have provided guidance to us on how we can enhance our ad products to help applications increase traffic in a cost effective manner.

Based on that feedback, we've released new ad targeting capabilities built specifically for our developer community. Developers can now target ads to users who have never visited their applications to tap into new growth areas in Facebook's social graph. They can also target existing users of their applications to encourage repeat visits:

Click here to learn more about ads or simply get started.

Over the coming months, we will continue to look for ways to evolve our ad products in ways that are tailored to the developer community. If you are interested in providing feedback on our advertising solutions, please fill out our survey.

In addition, we are committed to helping you better monetize users who visit your applications. We are currently conducting an alpha test in which select applications can accept Facebook Credits from users. Our 250 million users can now buy Facebook Credits in 15 currencies and we believe that, as Facebook Credits become more broadly available on Platform, they will meaningfully improve developer monetization and provide a great experience for users. If you are interested in accepting Facebook Credits in your application, please let us know by responding here.

As always, we appreciate your feedback and look forward to working with you to help build profitable businesses on Platform.

Over 8 million users become fans of Facebook Pages every day to connect with their favorite public figures and organizations and get updates directly in their streams. Now, users can connect with brands, musicians, celebrities, businesses, and more, whether they're on or off Facebook.

Today, we're excited to launch the Fan Box, a Facebook Connect-enabled social widget that Page owners can add to their websites to allow users to fan and view the accompanying Facebook Page stream. With the Fan Box, brands can bring content from their Facebook Page into their website and help convert website visitors into Facebook fans. Users can view the most recent posts from the Page, see a list of other fans (including their friends), and, most importantly, become a fan without leaving the site. Additionally, if a user visits the site and isn't logged in to Facebook, the user can log in and become a fan directly inline as well.

The Fan Box takes just a few minutes to set up and integrate into your website, using only four lines of JavaScript. The code is available from your Page - just click Add Fan Box to your site underneath your Page's profile picture. Each Fan Box includes the Become a Fan button. You can customize the Fan Box to include additional features including the stream of recent posts as well as a list of fans. The Fan Box can integrate tightly into your website - it takes a minimum of 200px width and 64px height for the button, and 554px height with all features included. You can read more detailed instructions on our Developer Wiki.

Check out some examples of how sites are integrating the Fan Box, and get inspiration for how you can add the Fan Box to your site.

• Threadless uses the Fan Box to feature the videos and posts they make to their Facebook fans.
• Newsweek integrated the Fan Box to encourage users to become a fan and get news updates through Facebook.
• Coca-Cola's Fan Box integration encourages Coca-Cola customers to become fans on Facebook.

Others implementing the Fan Box on their websites today include ABC News, NPR, World Wildlife Fund, (RED), BlackBerry, Lance Armstrong/Livestrong, Roger Federer, Lenny Kravitz, Kings of Leon, Tide, and Herbal Essences.

We're looking forward to making it easier for you to connect with your fans across the Web. Please send us any feedback on the Developer Forum.

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 June, 2009.

New Features

• We released the Live Stream Box, our second social widget. Let your users connect, share, and post updates to Facebook in real time from your application or Facebook Connect website.
• Make your FQL queries even more powerful with fql.multiquery. This method lets you send a batch of queries to Facebook for simultaneous processing, and you can use the results from one query in the batch in another query within the same call.

Updates

• You can now use admin.setAppProperties to set icon_url, logo_url and connect_logo_url properties.
• Due to security vulnerabilities in recent versions of the Flash Player, we increased the sitewide minimum Flash Player version to 9.0.159.0 for Flash Player 9 and 10.0.22.87 for Flash Player 10. Without the appropriate upgrade, no Flash content displayed on Facebook can play.This affects the FBML fb:swf and fb:flv tags, which previously required a minimum Flash Player version of 9.0.115.
• For FBML applications that use multi-friend selectors, you can specify a name for each unique fb:multi-friend-input.
• The album FQL table contains a new column, type, which classifies the album into one of four types: profile, mobile, Wall, or normal.
• You can upload or replace photos with events.create and events.edit by posting an image when making the call.

Announcements

• We changed the policy around who can access the beta site (http://www.beta.facebook.com) so you can test your applications against our weekly code push. Now only user accounts marked as Platform test users can access beta site. We're moving to a model where the beta site will be automatically updated—possibly every day—so that developers can constantly poll the site and make sure your application continues to work with it. By limiting the site to Platform test accounts, we can offer a fully functioning version of Facebook where developers can exercise their applications while limiting the amount of real user data that can be accessed.
• Facebook Connect continues to spread across the Web, and has made its way onto devices like the iPhone. Look for it on the Watchmen Blu-ray disc and soon on the Xbox.

Articles/Videos

• At Facebook Developer Garage London, over 100 developers focused on social gaming dynamics and explored the principles for creating successful social games on Facebook. Watch this short report.
  

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.

The Platform team stayed close to home early this month with the Facebook Friends.get Party – Birthday Edition event hosted on our home front in San Francisco. Developers, VCs, and tech luminaries joined us to celebrate the 2nd year of Platform and all the contributions created by our developer community.

Celebrating through education, four Developer Garages took place this month with developers worldwide collaborating and sharing their Facebook Platform experiences. The Facebook Developer Garage program serves as a forum to share information and ideas among developers and build together using Facebook Platform.

In New York, over 450 developers gathered to hear local speakers share their thoughts and best practices on Facebook Connect, the Open Stream API, and Platform. Facebook's Annand Sharma shared the latest news on Facebook Connect and Platform technologies.

Across the ocean in London, over 100 developers focused this month on social gaming dynamics and explored the principles for creating successful social games on Facebook. They looked at how you can apply gaming mechanics to increase engagement and retention in a non-gaming community website.

Down in Dallas, over 200 developers met to discuss Facebook Connect and how best to use Facebook Pages. They delved into a variety of monetization and social media strategies for advertisers to best reach their audience on Facebook.

Meanwhile in China, the Developer Garage Shanghai covered every aspect of Facebook's offerings to developers. Facebook Platform engineer Wei Zhu joined over 300 Chinese developers to share information on Facebook Connect and the latest on Platform. They discussed the principles and philosophies of creating successful engaging social games and examined examples of how these principles had been leveraged to create interesting 3D iPhone Facebook Connect implementations.

If you'd like to host a Developer Garage in your region, please see our Developer Wiki to learn more about the program or check out the Platform Page to find more Garages near you. We look forward to seeing you at a Facebook event soon!

*Special thanks to our hosts Trapeze, Facebook Developer Garage London, CoHabitat, China Social App Developers, and to our sponsor Intel.

As Facebook has grown internationally into a worldwide network, we've come to realize that organizing our users into geographic networks isn't as useful as knowing where a user is currently located. This is especially true from an international perspective, where a region would represent a whole country. To this end, we're shifting our focus to the city where the user currently lives, as this provides more relevant information for friends to share with each other.

Recently we started deprecating regional networks from the user profile. We expect the process to finish within the month. Corporate and educational networks will continue to appear on the user’s profile. For users who haven't specified a current location, we'll populate that field with what was formally their regional network.

What Does This Mean for My Applications?

At this time, nothing will change -- we'll continue to return regional network information for the next 3 months (until September 30, 2009), even though this information will no longer appear on users' profiles starting this week. Moving forward, when you need a user's location information for your application, use the current_location field instead of affiliations.

For calls to users.getStandardInfo and queries on the standard_user_info FQL table, we'll now return current_location for location information. We'll still return affiliations as well, but after 90 days, we'll return only corporate and educational networks for affiliations.

Similarly, after 90 days, for calls to users.getInfo or queries on the user FQL table, we won't return regional networks for affiliations; we will still return corporate and educational networks though.

Note that the user’s current location isn’t used for privacy purposes. You can read more about the user changes on the Facebook company blog.

We'll announce ahead of time when we finally deprecate regional networks from the code and stop sending that data to your applications. As always, we welcome your comments on the Developer Forum.