Social Design Guidelines to help you build great social experiences

Social design is quickly becoming the norm for any successful app. However, we haven’t yet emphasized why understanding social design is important and how to implement social design in your apps. Today we have published the Social Design Guidelines on our Developer Site to help you understand why you should build great social experiences as well as how to use Facebook Platform effectively to create them.

Social design is a product strategy that builds upon users’ trusted communities, encourages conversation between them and ultimately creates a stronger sense of identity for everyone. By putting people at the center of the Web, more and more experiences that naturally happen in the real world are starting to happen online. As we design new products, we should take into account existing social truths, thinking carefully about the identities and respective communities we affect and building the best conversation tools for them.

We will continue to develop these guidelines over time, build new features on Facebook Platform to help enable great social experiences, as well as publish related How-Tos to help you understand these principles as they apply to specific product verticals. We welcome and encourage your feedback.