Developer news
August 2009 Platform News

As part of our ongoing effort to improve communication with our developer community, we offer you the latest monthly roundup of the announcements, new features, and updates to Facebook Platform that occurred during August, 2009.

New Features

Updates

  • We enhanced the Open Stream API. Now Facebook Connect sites and IFrame and FBJS applications can publish to users' streams with two new API calls, a JavaScript version of stream.publish and an FBJS version. When using any stream.publish method to post application content, your application gets attribution in the post. And, you can now retrieve a Facebook Page's stream using stream.get or the stream FQL table, and you can prompt a user to grant extended permissions to any Facebook Page for which the user is an admin.
  • We updated the design of Facebook Share. If you own or run a website, you can use Facebook Share so your users can easily share content from your site on Facebook.
  • Final reminder for stream.get and stream FQL table: As we announced on May 19th, 2009, we're deprecating the posts field of the comments array returned by stream.get and the stream FQL table in favor of its replacement, comment_list, for proper XML serialization. We stopped returning the 'posts' field on August 25, 2009.
  • Facebook Platform code face-lift: We're refactoring the Platform API and updating the JavaScript Client Library. The Platform API refactoring requires no changes on your part, while the JavaScript library update involves a new, optional feature loader and better organizing of features into distinct components within the library.
  • We corrected the count of total applications users. This number isn't public facing, as it appears only on your application's Insights page.

Announcements

  • Learn about our plans for improving user privacy on Platform.
  • In order to improve site performance through better load balancing, we've begun to gradually serve more canvas page traffic from our east coast data center.

Articles/Videos

  • Watch Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg address the Facebook Developer Garage São Paulo: here are the first video and the second video.

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.