Facebook Developers

Earlier today, we announced Translations for Facebook Connect, which simplifies and streamlines the process of translating a website into to any of the more than 65 different languages Facebook currently supports. As we continue to provide ways for you to increase distribution and add social context to any site through Facebook Connect, we want to make implementing these tools as seamless and simple as possible. To meet this goal, today we are launching the Facebook Connect Wizard and Playground -– tools that simplify the implementation process so that developers and non-developers alike can experience the benefits of Facebook Connect including increased traffic and site engagement.

The Power of Facebook Connect

Establishing a presence on the social Web requires fundamental building blocks. Facebook provides these essential tools, including identity for a great registration system, and immediate access to 300 million active global users. Facebook Connect gives entrepreneurs of all sizes -- and with varying developer resources -- the ability to build traffic efficiently through reaching a relevant audience, while offering an engaging user experience. From making the registration process easier for users, to bringing friends together, to gaining distribution from sharing back to Facebook, there are many benefits that come along with Facebook Connect, and we're focused on helping you optimize your website and service to provide a more social experience for users.

With the Connect Wizard, you can now incorporate Facebook Connect into your site in 3 easy steps.

Additionally, the Playground for Facebook Connect provides code samples for adding profile pictures, user names, and friends to your site. We will continue to add more code samples as we see more usage. The team worked hard to put this together and looks forward to getting feedback. In addition, we're continuing to improve our Facebook Connect resources for developers to make it easier for you to learn and implement with new how-to guides and updated documentation.

Alex, a platform engineer, is adding Connect to all of his sites.

Translating your website to tailor its content to an international audience can be expensive, time consuming, and complicated. Idiomatic phrases, complex sentence structures, and slang expressions can make website translation a daunting -- and confusing -- task. Today at the Future of Web Apps (FOWA) conference in London we are are announcing Translations for Facebook Connect to help solve this problem for other websites and applications.

We're basing Translations for Facebook Connect on the solution we developed for our own site when we needed to make Facebook available in more languages. In January 2008, we introduced the Translations application, effectively turning the translation process over to our users -- the people who understood Facebook and their languages best. We were blown away by its success. The site was translated into Spanish in two weeks and French followed soon after and was translated in just 24 hours. Now, less than two years after introducing the app, Facebook is available in more than 65 languages, all translated by our users using the Translations application.

Translations for Facebook Connect is available as a free tool for developers worldwide to simplify the process of translating a website, IFrame or FBML-based application into any of the languages Facebook currently supports. For example, with Translations for Facebook Connect, country tourist boards or travel sites that want to attract foreign visitors on holiday can use this framework to translate their sites and automatically present the content to users in their native language after they log in with Facebook Connect.

We're excited to see what you can do with this tool. As a technology and platform company, we believe services like this can serve as building blocks for a Web driven by people, where you can connect with anyone or anything you care about, anywhere you choose and now in many different languages.

How It Works

You can start integrating Translations for Facebook Connect into your site with an HTML file and a few lines of JavaScript in less than an hour. Whether you want to translate an application, a social widget, or an entire website, you have complete control over every aspect of the translation process. After you choose what languages you want your site or application to support, you can get help from the Facebook community to translate your site, as we did, or you can do the translation yourself, or make a specific person the administrator of the process. To start translating your site, read the documentation on the Developer Wiki.

With a revamped set of server-side API methods, you can submit content to the Translations application as needed by calling the intl.uploadNativeStrings API method, as well as retrieve submitted and translated content through the intl.getTranslations API method and translation FQL table. Once you register content for translation, your connected Facebook users can start translating your sites' content just as users helped translate Facebook.

There's also a new client-side feature set, built upon our XFBML framework. We've created an XFBML version of the fb:intl tag and other related tags, which let you get started more quickly and easily. Developers who use these features will not only automatically have their wrapped content submitted to the Facebook Translations application, but translators will also have the option of translating the content inline.

To try out the new XFBML features, we've created a very basic demo to get started. With this, you can quickly get started and see the translation mechanism in action.

We look forward to helping you better connect people with one another wherever they are in the world, and wherever they are on the Web.

Cat, de l'équipe Facebook Connect, a traduit cette phrase avec la nouvelle application de traduction.
(Cat, who is on the Facebook Connect team, translated this sentence using the new translations application.)

The Facebook team is in London this week to join the international community of developers, entrepreneurs and designers at Future of Web Apps (FOWA) London to talk about the latest with Facebook Connect. We hope you'll meet up with us in person at one of our events or via our live stream.

Schedule (all times in GMT +1 hour)

Wednesday, 30 September, 2009

FOWA London Workshop

• 9:00 AM-12:30 PM
• How to Build with Facebook Connect and add Social Context to Your Website. You can sign up for the workshop on the FOWA London Page
• Speaker: Cat Lee

Facebook Developer Garage London

6:00 PM – 9:00 PM This event is open to all, and we hope you can join us as we team up with the Facebook Developer Garage London group to bring you the latest on Facebook Connect. Please RSVP on the Facebook Event if you plan on attending, as space will fill up quickly. Speakers: James Leszczenski and Facebook developers.

Online TV Shows by Ustream

Thursday, 1 October, 2009

FOWA Keynote: Going Global: The Future of Facebook Connect

• 2:55 PM - 3:20 PM
• The future is a world where social experiences are everywhere. Facebook shares new Facebook Connect features that will help you build successful social and localized experiences.
• Speaker: Cat Lee

Webcam chat at Ustream

We hope to see you there!

Julia, who manages developer events worldwide, is boarding the plane to London.

We announced and open sourced Tornado two weeks ago. Tornado is a relatively simple, non-blocking Web server framework written in Python. It's designed to handle thousands of simultaneous connections, making it ideal for real-time Web services.

Since then, hundreds of developers have started following the Tornado project on GitHub, the developer mailing list has become active with people from all over the world starting to use Tornado, and we've received over a dozen code contributions back to the project.

Building on his post, "The Technology Behind Tornado", Bret Taylor spoke to a few dozen developers about Tornado at a Facebook Tech Talk yesterday evening. We were excited to see Facebook engineers, members of the developer community, and the tech press at the event. You can read CNET’s Caroline McCarthy’s take on the talk here. Bret's slides and a video from the Tech Talk are embedded below, and as always we've posted the content on the Facebook Engineering Tech Talk Page.

It's great to see all of the developer excitement around Tornado and we'd love to hear about how Tornado helps bring real-time functionality to your own site!

David, open programs manager, wants to hear about your experience with Tornado.

Here on the Facebook Platform Engineering team, we strive to keep Facebook Connect fast and stable, and to help you ensure that your implementations are working and bug free.

We recently began working on a suite of automated tests for some of our top partners that would confirm that Facebook Connect is always functioning. While doing this, we decided it'd be great if we could create a library that would help any Facebook Connect developer easily create automated tests for your own sites.

We've written a library on top of Watir that helps you deal with all the generic issues needed to stress test a Facebook Connect implementation. In the simplest form, you can ensure that users are always capable of Connecting with Facebook. If you have a more complex sites, you can also test that your specific Connect integrations are working correctly. Additionally, we've also included a demonstration of the library in use, functionally testing StreamDiff (download the source code), a cool Facebook Connect site built by my coworker Naitik Shah.

We've written a detailed article on our Developer Wiki that goes through a step by step process on how you can do this on your own site.

Justin, a software engineer, is testing the watir.

We're excited to host today's Facebook Developer Garage at TechCrunch50 in San Francisco. At this global competition for start-ups, we're inspired by the innovative business models, and we're particularly excited by those powered by Facebook.

Building a new technology start-up on the social Web means that you need building blocks. Facebook provides these tools, including identity for a great registration system and immediate access to 300 million active users. Facebook Connect gives entrepreneurs of all sizes the ability to build traffic efficiently through reaching a relevant audience, while offering an engaging user experience where content is consumed and interacted with in a social context.

From mobile phones to websites and gaming consoles, entrepreneurs are building with Facebook to give people ways to connect with their real friends, anywhere. We've seen many businesses successfully iterate on established models, but start-ups are leading this trend. Two weeks ago, fbFund's REV showcased several businesses powered by Facebook and several more are launching at TechCrunch50 this week, including Freedom Speaks and RefMob.

Facebook Connect integrations range from quite simple to the much more advanced. Many sites get started with the basics to add incremental value -- by implementing Facebook Social Widgets, such as the Share button, Comments Box, Live Stream Box, and Fan Box, to drive traffic and make the experience more engaging. And we want to make this easier. We will continue to build great widgets and make them easily accessible on Widget Central, our new destination for social widgets. In addition, we're continuing to improve our Facebook Connect resources for developers to make it easier for you to learn and implement.

We also want to help you make your good Facebook Connect integrations great. Like any successful website or application, building with Facebook requires optimization and iteration. We've identified three levers to optimize with Facebook Connect:

1. Increase the number of connected users.
2. Increase the publish rate per user.
3. Increase the click-through-rate on Facebook stories.

But what does this mean in practice?

Gregg Spiridellis, CEO of JibJab, is joining us at TechCrunch50 to share best practices. Since 1999, JibJab has been in the business of helping people laugh, through its original online programming. JibJab deeply integrated numerous Facebook Connect features, including simplified login, access to friends, birthday data, user photos and friends' photos, and most importantly, distribution capabilities for users to post content to their own stream or to a friend's Wall. Its Facebook Connect implementation helped attract 100,000 active users in just two months, and users click on their Facebook stories approximately seven times more than e-mail stories.

JibJab's approach illustrates how to turn a good Facebook Connect implementation into a great one. We look forward to seeing the next great Facebook integration from you!

Justin, who leads Connect Marketing, wishes he could rock out like David Swain.

The Facebook Developer Garage Program from Julia Lam on Vimeo.

At Facebook, we enable developers and entrepreneurs large and small to leverage our tools to build social features into their sites and applications. Tomorrow, we’ll be at the TechCrunch50 conference in San Francisco to speak with start-ups about how they can optimize their businesses with Facebook Connect.

We hope you'll join us either in person or via live stream as we share our thoughts on innovation and entrepreneurship at the Facebook Developer Garage San Francisco – TechCrunch50 Edition. Alongside JibJab, we will demonstrate the latest Facebook features and share Facebook Connect success factors.

In the afternoon, Mike Schroepfer, Facebook Vice President of Engineering, will be joined by industry luminaries Dick Costolo, Reid Hoffman, Sean Parker, and Robert Scoble as they give advice to start-ups launching in the News and Media Discovery and Social Media Streams spaces.

Catch the event online starting at 1:15 PM PDT on Tuesday.

Free Webcam Chat at UStream

Schedule (all times PDT Tuesday):
1:15 - 2:15 PM -- Facebook Developer Garage San Francisco – TechCrunch50 Edition.
2:30 – 4:00 PM -- Start-ups focused on News and Media Discovery.
4:15 - 5:45 PM -- Start-ups focused on Social Media Streams.

Julia, who manages developer events worldwide, looks forward to seeing you all tomorrow!

Real-time updates have become an important aspect of the social Web that make it easier to share with friends. In March, we introduced a real-time News Feed to make the stream as relevant and engaging as possible for users. Similarly, FriendFeed, which we recently acquired, built their entire site to support real-time updates. It hasn't been easy to build and scale these features, so today we're open-sourcing a core piece of infrastructure called Tornado, which was originally developed by the FriendFeed team.

Tornado is a relatively simple, non-blocking Web server framework written in Python, designed to handle thousands of simultaneous connections, making it ideal for real-time Web services. Tornado is a core piece of infrastructure that powers FriendFeed's real-time functionality, which we plan to actively maintain. While Tornado is similar to existing Web-frameworks in Python (Django, Google's webapp, web.py), it focuses on speed and handling large amounts of simultaneous traffic.

Tornado also provides support for templates (you can also use Django templates), cookie handling and user authentication, security, localization, and static file serving.

It is no longer just the traditional Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP stack that make a site like Facebook or FriendFeed possible, but new infrastructure tools like Tornado, Cassandra, Hive (built on top of Hadoop), memcache, Scribe, Thrift, and others are essential. We believe in releasing generically useful infrastructure components as open source (see Facebook Open Source) as a way to increase innovation across the Web.

For more technical details about Tornado, check out the blog post from Facebook Director of Products, Bret Taylor. If you find this interesting, keep in mind that we're always looking for exceptional software engineers to join our team.

You can find Tornado's source code on GitHub, along with its documentation and a developer mailing list .

David, open programs manager, is gearing up to chase the next Tornado.

We are big fans of open source software and standards. Whenever one of our internal projects will benefit the developer community at large, we try to make the jump by turning it into an open source project. Likewise, when we see a great open standard emerging, we do our best to stand behind it and support it. OpenID, which allows users to carry their identity across the Web, is one of those great open standards.

Recently we took another step in this direction by launching OpenID support for Web.de and GMX. As two of the largest webmail providers in Germany, they give users a seamless experience across the Web by letting them automatically log in to external sites. When someone with a linked account receives a Facebook notification in their email inbox, they will no longer have to sign in to Facebook to view the link. Once the user clicks the link, Facebook will verify the user's identity with the webmail provider and automatically log them in, which allows them to find out what their friends are up to that much faster.

With the rapid growth Facebook is experiencing in Germany, Web.de and GMX aren't stopping at registered users, but are also expanding to new Facebook users. Web.de and GMX users don’t need to enter their name, email, or birthday on the registration form, and soon they will be able to easily find contacts from their webmail client who are also on Facebook without ever sharing their webmail password.

The best part about this is that since OpenID is an open standard, the integration was pretty seamless. We reused nearly all our code (we already have an OpenID implementation for users coming from Gmail) and it helped mitigate a significant number of overnight delays that are expected when working with companies in another time zone. It also helped that Web.de and GMX are great to work with. Only a small subset of our users are in Germany, so as OpenID adoption continues to spread, we look forward to the opportunity to integrate with additional webmail providers and impact even more users.

Peter, a software engineer, is excited to discover more friends on Facebook with OpenID.

Over the last three years, there has been unprecedented innovation in the mobile industry, made evident by a surge of new devices and applications. As engagement with this technology grows, developers are empowered with the opportunity to create compelling experiences that transcend platforms and enable users to engage with applications wherever they are. Last March, we announced Facebook Connect for iPhone, to make it possible for iPhone developers to integrate the power of Facebook with their apps. Today, we are bringing the power of Facebook Connect to every mobile developer with Facebook Connect for Mobile Web.

Facebook Connect for Mobile Web makes mobile sites or applications on any platform more social, and will provide developers with social distribution. Users can now publish Feed stories from their phones to Facebook, and those actions will be instantly distributed to their friends through News Feed. Facebook Connect for Mobile Web has the same rich features you find on Facebook Connect websites and iPhone apps, including:

• Making API calls so your application can access user data and integrate users' identities
• Publishing directly to the Facebook Stream
• Prompting users for additional permissions

For example, using just a few lines of code, Qik integrated Facebook Connect for Mobile Web with their Symbian client for Nokia smartphones, making it easy for users to connect to Qik and share with their friends from their phones.

We'll continue to work with the industry to ensure that mobile developers have access to our powerful set of tools and APIs, with which they can enable users to access Facebook wherever they are.

Michael, a product manager, wants to put all of your friends into your pocket.

Editor's Note: Like the taglines? Keep your eye out for more improvements to the Developer Blog. We'd love to know what else you'd like to see. Please share your thoughts in the Developer Forum.

We are excited to have touched new regions this month with three Developer Garages in emerging markets worldwide.

In our first Developer Garage in South America, the Facebook team journeyed down to support the Developer Garage São Paulo. Mark Zuckerberg spoke at the event and shared the vision of Facebook and Facebook Platform with over 150 developers and press. Brazilian developers then helped educate each other on the benefits of Facebook Connect and Facebook Connect for iPhone.

Off to the east in Bangladesh, they hosted their first Developer Garage Dhaka. Over 400 developers gathered to learn more about Facebook Pages, the Open Stream API, and Facebook Connect for iPhone. With a deep love for their popular sports like cricket, they demonstrated the success of a number of sports applications on Facebook.

We closed the month with the Developer Garage Bangalore with over 125 technical developers gathering to share knowledge on how to build on Facebook with Facebook engineer, Vishu Gupta. They also focused on how to create social games and use social media marketing to publicize their applications and businesses.

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 iEvento, Infrablue Technology Ltd., Chakpak Media & Accel Partners, and to our sponsor Intel.

Yesterday, we wrapped up a great event for our first fbFund REV social incubator. Congratulations to the fbFund REV companies! They showcased their progress and accomplishments to over 300 investors, press, and other members of our community.

Announcement highlights

• Thread.com (formerly Frintro) raised a $1.2M seed round of financing. The seed financing included participation from fbFund and was led by First Round Capital. Others included:
  • Sequoia Capital (Roelof Botha, Partner)
  • Founders Fund (Dave McClure, Investor)
  • Ron Conway (Founding General Partner at SV Angel)
  • David Sacks (CEO at Yammer and Geni)
  • Auren Hoffman (CEO at Rapleaf)
  • Pedro Miguel Martins (Sr. Dir. Corporate Strategy at SAP)
  • Reid Hoffman (Chairman at LinkedIn)
  • Joe Greenstein and Saran Chari (CEO and CTO at Flixster)
  • Shervin Pishevar (CEO at Social Gaming Network)
  Thread.com uses Facebook Connect to create a site for social dating via friendly intros. You can learn more about Thread on the Facebook blog.
• Nutshell Mail raised over $500k in funding. Nutshell Mail uses email to help you manage your social network activity.
• RentMineOnline raised over $300k in funding have been profitable for the past 4-5 months. They combine the success of resident referral programs with the power of your friends on Facebook.
• Sociable raised over $150k in funding. Breakeven by Q4/09, Sociable is building a comprehensive solution for online retailers to drive sales via the power of online friendships.
• WildFire Apps achieved profitability over the summer. Their product lets you create Facebook and social media and promotion campaigns for businesses. They have multiple brand-name customers (Pepsi, Redbull, Zappos to name a few).
• Zimride signed 25-30 academic and corporate customers across the country and formed an exclusive partnership with ZipCar. They are projecting break-even by Q4/09. Zimride helps classmates and coworkers share the ride.
• Two other companies, GroupCard and NetworkedBlogs, will achieve profitability or break-even by end of 2009.

Presentations from the event

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Video from the Live UStream

Photos from the event

Backlight.org team just before their presentation

We had over 150 attendees in the main demo room

Waleed giving the pitch for NetworkedBlogs

Photos from the event were taken by Shirley Lin. More can be found here.

Press Coverage

• All Facebook: fbFund Startup Thread.com Gets $1.2 Million In Funding
• Inside Facebook: Live Notes from Facebook’s fbFund REV Demo Day in Palo Alto
• Mashable: 22 Facebook Funded Startups to Watch
• Mashable: LIVE VIDEO: Facebook Funded Developers Demo Their Apps
• TechCrunch: Live From fbFund REV’s Demo Day
• The Wall Street Journal: Facebook’s Rev Program Gives Start-Ups Deeper Connections
• VentureBeat: fbFund’s Wildfire builds contests on Facebook for brands
• All Facebook: fbFund REV Demo Day Is Today
• TechCrunch: A Look At fbFund’s First Summer As An Incubator Program

If you're interested in applying to the next round of fbFund, or would like to stay updated on the fbFund teams, become a fan the fbFund Page or visit our website and stay tuned for our next announcement.

A final special thanks goes out to the mentors and the core team that helped make fbFund REV social incubator a success!

Today, at one of our old offices in downtown Palo Alto, it's graduation day for our first round of the fbFund REV social incubator program. We're wrapping up a packed summer of innovation, collaboration, and hard work with a packed house of VCs, press, Facebook employees, and entrepreneurs who will be on hand to watch 20+ teams demo what they've built. Of course the fbFund REV summer wouldn't be complete without some news of profitability, funding, and growth. Stay tuned for more details as the excitement unfolds.

Vision and Background

Having more than 20 startups and upwards of 60 people here today is proof that our vision for fbFund, and more broadly, Facebook Platform and Facebook Connect, is gaining momentum. We launched Facebook Platform and Facebook Connect to give developers and entrepreneurs the power to build tools that help people share and communicate on Facebook and across the Web. We started fbFund with Founders Fund and Accel Partners soon after launching Facebook Platform to remove some of the barriers to getting a company started and to provide mentorship and marketing support.

This round for fbFund was announced at SXSW in March with the launch of Facebook Connect on the iPhone. Over 400 developers and entrepreneurs from around the world applied for this round of funding. These submissions were narrowed to the top 50 finalists and, finally, to eighteen startups and two non-profits. To round out the program, a few more startups from past fbFund rounds were added. We invited more than twenty of our fbFund Council advisors and investors to help us review, rate, interview, and select the finalists. fbFund invested over US$800,000 in equity investments this round.

It’s More than the Money

While we think we can do a little to help startups get started and become social, it’s what they do next that matters. In fbFund REV, we looked for teams of entrepreneurs that show tremendous potential in the apps, websites, and business models they develop. We are excited to see many of the businesses using Facebook Connect as well as several engaging new Platform apps on the list of finalists. The diverse startups range from businesses around running, religion, and apartment referrals to social games, business communication, dating, and music, retail, and travel. In all of these categories, users can benefit by using these applications and Connect integrations with their real friends on Facebook or around the Web.

Each team will give a 5- to 7-minute pitch about their company. Please join us for the live UStream of the event.

Live Embed: Webcam chat at Ustream

Schedule of Events

1:00 - 1:30: Kickoff by Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook Chief Operating Officer
1:30 - 3:00: fbFund REV Pitches
3:00 - 3:30: Break
3:30 - 5:00: fbFund REV Pitches

To learn more about fbFund REV social incubator, check out this video:

Thanks again to everyone who made this summer exciting. We especially want to thank our community of developers and entrepreneurs that served as mentors and those who continue to build great experiences on Facebook Platform and with Facebook Connect. If you're interested in applying to the next round of fbFund, or would like to stay updated on the fbFund teams, become a fan the fbFund Page and stay tuned for our next announcement.