May 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 May, 2009.

New Features

• Publish into users' streams with the Open Streams API. All developers can publish into the stream, provided you get approved to prompt your users for the publish_stream extended permission.
• The Verified Apps Program has launched! Check out the new application directory and apply now by submitting your application (click the Submit Application for Verification link.
• Your application information now appears on an application profile (formerly your application's About page).
• Facebook supports OpenID for automatic login. Check out the technical requirements.
• Users can interact with your application's Publisher on Facebook Pages.
• We added two new calls to the Comments API -- comments.add and comments.remove -- to help you manage comments as well as add or remove them on behalf of users.
• You can get your users' family information by accessing the family field in the user FQL table or by calling users.getInfo. You can also get the contents in the blurb under a user's profile picture by getting the profile_blurb field from this table or call.
• User-to-user notifications now get appear in real time when your users are browsing Facebook.

Updates

• We simplified Platform Policy (including the Developer Terms of Service, Platform Guidelines, and Platform Policy), by reorganizing the documents into the Platform Guidelines and the Statement of Rights and Responsibilities.
• We changed the name of the posts field — which is part of the comments array returned by stream.get and the stream FQL table — to comment_list for proper XML serialization. We'll return a list of comments in both posts and comment_list for the next two months, before deprecating the posts field entirely July 19, 2009.
• We added more methods that you can control through the Permissions API.
• photos.getAlbums now includes an extra field called modified_major in the results. This field indicates the time a major update (like addition of photos) was last made to the album.
• We added a metadata field to the stream.get API call. This lets you specify albums, profiles, and photo_tags, so you can request this data concurrently with a single call to stream.get. These parameters strictly optional, but albums and profiles default to true (until we deprecate them June 9, 2009) to keep existing functionality from breaking.
• Comments Boxes on Facebook Connect sites now open links to profiles in a new window rather than overwriting/navigating away from the Connect site.

Announcements

• We kicked off fbFund REV 2009, our new startup incubator program for social websites, applications, and platforms.

Articles/Videos

• Watch the Verified Apps video, which discusses why applications are better when they're social.
  

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.