April 2009 Platform News

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.