Facebook Developers

A while ago, we announced that we would be making a change to the canvas page to prevent applications from displaying information in the Facebook chrome, outside the canvas portion of the page. The fix involves wrapping the content of the canvas page inside the style attribute position:relative.

This change may impact your application and cause items to be displayed incorrectly in the following cases:


If you think that your application may be affected, please read the migration doc on the wiki to find out how you can test your canvas pages and make them work with the fix.

We will be flipping the switch to wrap canvas pages in position:relative in two weeks, on December 6th, 2007.

As part of our ongoing improvements to News Feed, we recently made it possible for users to see stories from applications they have not added. To help us choose the stories that are most interesting to our users, we’ve also added a user feedback system that allows users to vote for stories they like and against stories they don’t. This change is beneficial to you, as application developers, because it could potentially give your application stories wider distribution. At the same time, however, a larger pool of application stories will be competing for each spot in a user’s News Feed. Here are a few tips for getting your stories out to the largest audience:

1. Use feed.publishTemplatizedAction and register your story templates with us. Only stories with registered templates will be visible to users who have not added your application. If you know your story is only interesting to users who have already added your application, choose the “added users only†option so other users won’t see it. (Note: We recommend using feed.publishTemplatizedAction even if you are not registering the template because feed.publishActionOfUser will eventually be deprecated.)

2. Link to pages that the user can view without being logged in to your application. This is your chance to capture the user’s attention and show him or her the value of your application. Being directed immediately to a login prompt is not an optimal experience – the user may vote your story down, which would make it less likely to appear to other users in the future.

3. Be creative. Write interesting stories. Write stories with useful (and truthful) content. Publishing fewer, higher quality stories will get you more distribution than flooding your users with meaningless stories. It’s up to you to find out just what will make your application stories stand out. We’re looking forward to seeing what you come up with.

Today at the Facebook Developer Garage Dallas, we announce a partnership with Joyent to provide free, fast, and scalable hosting to Facebook Developers.

Joyent's Accelerator on-demand infrastructure is best in class in the industry and provides the best load balancers on the market, routing and switching fabric, x86 servers, and storage from Dell. We've even peered Joyent's datacenter directly with ours for speedy roundtrips. Which means super fast performance for your Facebook application. And, to top it all off you get root access to a virtualized machine that includes all of the tools that you need to get going quickly developing your Facebook application. Including client libraries for PHP, Rails and Java, and memcached, right out of the box.

The price is free for one year. After that, Joyent asks that you move to one of their standard pricing plans for $45/month. You can cancel at anytime, and there are no contracts. If your application is awesome, and you need to scale more quickly, Joyent will work with you to move to a rate plan that can handle your scale.

We're excited to be partnering with Joyent to enable developers to provide fast, scalable experiences to users, for free. We hope to see more developers than ever before getting started quickly and easily on Facebook Platform.

Learn more now >

Happy Hacking!

We’ve heard from many application developers that their pre-existing user communities include people who aren’t yet on Facebook. We’ve created special registration links which give your non-Facebook users a streamlined way to join Facebook with your application already added to their accounts.

You can use these special registration links to promote your application more effectively. The links point to a user registration page and orientation process that is customized for your application. To learn more and see screenshots of this workflow, take a look at http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/RegistrationLinks.

Of course, if you give a special registration link to people who have already joined Facebook, they’ll be redirected to the “add†page for your application, or to the canvas page if they’ve already added your application.

Today we announce Facebook Ads. As a developer, Facebook Ads provides you with new opportunities to get greater growth for your application with Facebook Social Ads and to create an entirely new class of applications for Facebook Pages.

Facebook Pages
Facebook Pages expand the social graph by enabling brands, businesses, celebrities, and other entities to have a presence on Facebook.

As a developer, you now have new integration points, greater distribution through the expanded social graph, and a new opportunity to connect businesses and users in a relevant, compelling way. You can create all-new business-focused applications, or simply make the applications you've already built for users available for Facebook Pages. Through Facebook Pages, you have access to more users than ever before.

New Integration Points
Facebook Pages provide a business with a profile similar to a user profile, with many of the same features. As a developer you have access to new integration points:

- Pages Profile Box: You can create a profile box for a Page just like you can for a user profile.
- Pages Mini-Feed: As businesses add your application to their pages, your application will be shown in their Mini-Feed. Additionally, you can generate Mini-Feed stories for Pages in the exact same way as user profiles.
- News Feed: All stories that are shown on a Page's Mini-Feed are candidates for News Feed, and you can generate News Feed stories in the exact same way you do for user profiles.

It requires minimal work to integrate your applications into Facebook Pages, and uses the same Facebook Platform technology you're already familiar with.

Expanded Distribution
Facebook Pages expand the social graph, enabling new distribution points for applications and developers. Additionally, since more users interact with your application on Facebook Pages, more feed stories are generated, creating more viral distribution and higher engagement than ever before.

Applications for Businesses
Facebook Pages extend the ways that your application can interact with users, and now with brands, busineseses, celebrities, and more. As a developer you can adapt your current application for use on Pages, or you can create entirely new applications tailored to how these new entities interact with their supporters and fans.

Social Ads
Facebook Social Ads reach more than 50 million people with advanced targeting, content integration, and flexible pricing. As a developer, you can take advantage of Social Ads to boost the speed of distribution for your application.

When you advertise your application using Social Ads we will add social context to your ad by showing users which of their friends have added your application. This enables you to purchase trusted recommendations of your application to ensure users understand which of their friends have installed your application.

To learn more about the technical implementation details, check out the documentation or visit the wiki >

Enjoy!