Platform Updates: Operation Developer Love

By Monica Mosseri

This week, we added new features to the Comments Box, published a “How-To: Implement Facebook Credits” guide and filmed a tutorial to help canvas game developers begin the migration process to Facebook Credits. We also updated our Developer Roadmap.

HTTPS for Apps on Facebook.com

Earlier this year, we introduced the ability for users to browse Facebook over HTTPS. As a result, we provided “Secure Canvas URL” and “Secure Tab URL” fields in the Developer App for developers to serve their apps through an HTTPS connection. Without these fields, users will see the following dialog when they visit your app:

Today, 9.6 million people are browsing Facebook over HTTPS and the trend is continuing to increase.

If you haven’t already done so, please acquire an SSL certificate and fill out the Secure URL fields. This will ensure that users browsing Facebook over HTTPS will have a great experience over a secure connection.

Improving the user exerience of Platform apps

As a reminder, Social channels like News Feed and Notifications are an important way for you to engage users outside of your app on Facebook. One of our important principles is to maintain a great experience for users when using apps. In order to do this, we have automated systems in place that rely on user feedback to assess an app’s use of social channels. Our systems take into account permission requests, publishing rates, as well as user responses (e.g., did users hide a post from an app, like an app post, etc.). If our systems detect an app is abusing these channels, we will take appropriate action, up to and including disabling an app, to ensure a great user experience. Removing abusive app behavior adds to user trust of Platform, and in turn will make the ecosystem stronger for all developers.

To ensure that your app provides a great user experience, we strongly encourage you to:

1. Review our Platform Policies

We recently created a Platform Policy checklist for use in reviewing your app’s features and functionality at the concept stage of development and just prior to launch. The checklist is available in multiple languages, and although it is not an exhaustive list of the Facebook Platform Policies, it provides a quick “sanity check” to help ensure your app does not contain any easily-avoidable policy violations.

2. Review Insights.

We encourage you to look at the user feedback data (e.g., likes, hides, blocks) regularly to help improve your users’ experiences.

3. Review the Usage Notes.

We started adding “Usage Notes” to reference docs to help you understand the intended use cases for each feature. For example, we recently updated notes to the photos.addTag reference doc: This feature is intended to help users tag their friends in real photos. You should not use this feature to encourage users to tag their friends if they are not actually in that photo, or to tag friends in composite photos. If your app is found to be encouraging this behavior, your usage of this feature may be disabled.