October 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 October, 2009.

This month we announced our first ever Platform roadmap, so you can know in advance where we're headed and what to expect in the coming months.

New Features

• Check out the developer roadmap, and see how we're simplifying user communication, improving application discovery and engagement, and offering new developer products and policies.

  • Read the announcement.
  • Review the roadmap. Follow the roadmap to know what to expect.
  • Familiarize yourself with the updated Platform Principles and Policies.
  • We're simplifying the stream, so make sure you know how you can publish application stories on Facebook.
• We've extended Facebook Share to enrich the sharing experience on your website and make it easier for you to measure engagement. With a live counter and Share analytics, you can now track how often users share, comment on, like, and click back to a shared item.
• Monitor the current state of Platform with the Platform Live Status feed. You can subscribe to the feed via RSS. You can also subscribe to our announcements by email.
• Help users easily integrate Facebook into their websites and widgets with the Create Application API.

Updates

• For consistency and security reasons, Facebook Connect login dialogs now always render in a browser pop-up.
• We've updated the Facebook Events API, and released events.invite, so your users can now invite friends to events through your applications.
• We extended the Comments API methods (comments.get, comments.add, and comments.remove) so you can specify an object_id parameter in place of an XID. The comment FQL table now also takes an object_id as an indexable parameter.
• Your applications can now get the stream for a Facebook group, and post to the Walls of a group. You can specify a group ID as a source_id to retrieve the group's stream with stream.get and FB.ApiClient.stream_get, and as a target_id to publish onto the group's Wall with stream.publish, Facebook.streamPublish, and FB.Connect.streamPublish.
• You can now set the canvas_name application property using admin.setAppProperties instead of editing the setting in the Developer application.
• Desktop applications can upload photos using Facebook's open source library, based on Adobe AIR. Facebook for Adobe AIR now includes this feature.
• Adobe updated the ActionScript 3.0 library for Facebook Platform, which supports translations, fql.mutliquery, the Comments API, and the Inbox API.
• If you use either the XFBML or FBML version of the fb:comments tag, you can pass numposts=0 to let you filter and moderate comments.

Announcements

• Users can find out all they need to know about applications on the Applications on Facebook Page.

Articles/Videos

• Watch a video demonstrating how to drag and drop photos in Facebook for Adobe AIR.

Keep an eye on this blog (or subscribe to the RSS feed), the Platform Live Status (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.

Pete, the technical writer on the Platform team, likes keeping you up to date.