Facebook Developers

As we mentioned the other day, we're setting out to improve our profile design. Our goal is to make the profile simpler, relevant, and to give users a greater degree of control.

Today we're going to give you the first look at the profile. We're still iterating on the final design, so design elements and names can change. However, these screen shots will give you a good idea of what you can expect from the new design, showcasing some of the new additional integration points.

Notice that the profile is wider and we're organizing the user's profile information into a series of tabs. The "Wall" tab displays everything from Feed stories (including application feed stories), to Wall posts, posted items, updated status messages and others. The recent activity on profiles is highly interesting information to users and we are relying on applications to provide stories that are meaningful and engaging.

The About tab is where users will keep their personal information, now in a more structured way.

In this example, Photos has its own tab, and similarly, users can create custom tabs for your applications. In this way, your applications will have much greater prominence on a profile, nearly at the top of the page.

All profile boxes will appear in the narrow column of the profile. We're providing other mechanisms for increasing distribution. And users can always rearrange the order of their profile boxes in the narrow column.

Profile action links get displayed by default. More can appear, and their appearance is based on user interaction with the related applications.

You can keep track of what's changed in the Facebook Developer Wiki. We've also set up a Facebook Page, called Facebook Profiles Preview, where we're informing our users of the upcoming changes. We encourage you to become fans of the Page. We'll be sending weekly updates on the profile changes to fans of Facebook Profiles Preview as well as posting new screen shots there.

Almost all of the existing FBML tags and API methods will continue to work. In the coming weeks, we'll be releasing a few more API methods and FBML tags that are specific to the new integration and distribution points. There will be a transition period for you to adapt your applications to the new design before we launch the redesign to users. We'll give you lead time and existing functionality won't change immediately.

As always, we welcome your feedback. Send your comments or questions to developer-feedback@facebook.com. Please put [new profile] in the subject line.

Lately, Facebook profiles have become slower, more cluttered, and somewhat difficult to parse. Over the next few weeks, we'll roll out a number of improvements to the Facebook profile that are going to make the profile simpler, more relevant, and provide users with a greater degree of control.

The improved profile design helps better align the goals of application developers with the principles of the Platform ecosystem by:

Applications that further these objectives will be more successful and achieve greater usage. We encourage application developers to focus on building applications that facilitate communication, generate meaningful activity, and increase users' trust.

How will the improved profile design affect existing applications? We're going to give your applications more integration points within the profile so your applications fit more seamlessly into the Facebook user experience. Applications that use these tools in a way that users find valuable and meaningful will find success. However, some challenges could lie ahead for those applications that don't provide value and meaning for users.

In the coming weeks, we'll gradually release the changes and inform the community before they happen. Developers will have a transition period to make any changes that might be needed. These changes mean rich, engaging applications that will attract and satisfy more users.

We'll share more information on this page as we roll out the new design. We'll publish more details Tuesday with some screen shots illustrating some of the new integration points. We'd love to hear what you think, so if you have any comments or questions, please contact us at developers-help@facebook.com. Please put [new profile] in the subject line.

Facebook Platform is an “open market†where developers can freely experiment. We’re thrilled with the explosion of creativity and the value that’s been generated for users. We’ll continue to provide ever more powerful tools for developer innovation.

Of course, developers should never employ this flexibility to deliberately generate a bad experience for their users or anyone else. To that end, as part of our ongoing efforts to improve Platform through policy and technology changes, applications are prohibited from dead-ending users at an invite-friends page, and must never again prompt for invites after the user has declined.

More generally, unnecessarily gating access to application features behind inviting friends is not a best practice. The recently announced allocation system for requests ratchets down app access to invitations when an invite-friends UI is generating bad user experience. Additionally, it is misleading to entice an investment of effort or promise a result and then -- without warning -- hold expected content hostage behind an invitation ransom; this is now expressly prohibited.

Finally, please be aware of the reach of your application to those who haven’t sought it out. While we embrace the diversity of tastes expressed by apps, content sent through Facebook’s API communication channels may be encountered by people who don’t share your application’s sensibilities or are otherwise unsuited to it. Please refrain from transmitting app- or user-generated content that’s inappropriate for a general audience to those who might see it on their Facebook account (as opposed to your canvas page or another user’s profile box) through no action of their own. The policy is more formally expressed here; we’ll evolve it if necessary, but we hope common sense will prevail.

It is often said that through constraints comes creativity. Facebook policy parameters are designed to more fully enable the flourishing of the Platform ecosystem. We welcome your feedback and questions at developers-help@facebook.com; please put [policy questions] in the subject line.

Following the positive feedback we received after introducing an allocation system for notifications, we will roll out a feedback-based allocation system for requests next week. Applications will no longer have a static upper limit of 20 requests, but instead requests will be allocated based on how users have responded to past actions. The number of requests per application will be based on the rate that users accept and ignore requests, whether an application ignores user requests to skip inviting friends, as well as other metrics that reflect the affinity users show for the application as a whole.

This change aims to make requests a more useful channel for sharing valuable applications and valuable new modes of interaction. Our hope is that requests will be better aligned with a user's intention to share a good experience with an application and engage with friends in ways their friends will appreciate, not just with how frequently an application requests users invite friends.

We will be providing request allocations and metrics in the Insights stats page at the end of this week.

Please send your feedback to developers-help@facebook.com with [requests allocations] in the subject field.

We at Facebook are committed to fostering a positive environment for Facebook Platform. As Platform has quickly grown over the past few months we've noticed that, in order to provide the best experience to our users, we need to clarify and expand our policies, as well as provide some guidance on how to create good, engaging applications.

We've just published some articles on the Facebook Developers Wiki describing Platform policy and the escalation of responses we can take when our policies and Terms of Service are violated. This policy statement is a living document that will occasionally be updated. We will inform you of any changes via the Developer blog or Platform Status feed (both are located in the Facebook Developer app), but please keep an eye on the policy document to make sure you're in compliance.

We also created a series of best practices that will help you develop, promote and monetize successful applications.

We encourage you to read the Platform Policy and Escalation Procedures document so you can understand our policies and how they relate to the Facebook Developer Terms of Service.

We hope we've cleared things up for you. If you have further questions, please email us at developers-help@facebook.com with [policy questions] in the subject line.

After speaking at conferences and talking with developers on IRC, we've discovered that most developers are excited about our Data Store API, but are unsure of how to get started. The documentation on the wiki is detailed, but the number of function calls can be overwhelming to a developer unfamiliar with this new API. To address this issue, I created a new tool during our last Hackathon -- the Data Store API Admin tool.

The Data Store API Admin tool feels a bit like phpMyAdmin so that many of you would feel right at home. In it you'll find a list of objects, their properties, and associations, each with simple forms to help you get started. Also, we included an FQL query tool so you can browse through your data in an easy, visual way.

To access the Data Store API Admin tool, go to the Facebook Developers app, click the My Applications link at the top, then click the DataStoreAdmin link for the appropriate app.

What's more, you can also use our new JavaScript API library to get your application data from the Data Store API.

We'll keep adding more to this tool as time goes on. Thanks for your feedback!

The feedback-based allocation reporting mentioned in last week's developer blog post is now available under the Insights statistics page. There are two tabs:

Though these numbers are exposed to developers, the limits will not be turned on till later in the week. Tomorrow night we will be providing an API function that provides an application with its current allocation. It will return the same number seen in the Insights tab.

Hola!

Yesterday, we announced the release of Facebook in Spanish. We are really excited to bring Facebook to a whole new set of users in their native language. In the coming months, we plan to continue internationalizing and make similar releases in many other languages.

We took a neat approach to translation. In addition to shipping some of strings off to be translated, we used FBML to wrap all of our static text. When a bilingual user comes to the site, she sees untranslated English strings marked with a red link and can translate them inline. Using this approach, users were able to translate the entire site in less than a month.

We chose this method to make it easy for platform applications to internationalize. Soon developers will be able to use the same method that we used internally to work with users to translate their apps. While this system is not yet available, we wanted to assure developers that bringing your apps along is a top priority of internationalizing.

In the meantime, we have a quick way for applications to integrate with users in new locales. We are now sending a param "fb_sig_locale" to all canvas pages that signals the locale set for the visiting user. Feel free to use this to begin localizing.

To improve the Facebook Platform user experience and to reward compelling applications, we will be rolling out a feedback-based system that allots notifications in proportion to user response. Applications will no longer have a static upper limit of 40 notifications per user per day. Instead the number of notifications per application will be based on a range of factors including the rates that users ignore, hide, and report notifications as spam.

The new system aims to provide users with more compelling notifications and fewer notifications that they are likely to ignore or consider spam. We hope this change incentivizes developers to improve the quality of their notifications and encourage their users to send notifications to interested friends.

Before this change goes out, we will be providing two new Insights statistics tabs. These tabs provide developers with their current per user notification threshold as well as metrics on notifications that they can use to understand how users are responding. While there is a general correlation between good response rates and higher thresholds, other factors and metrics will be used to determine these scores as well and the allocations will adjust themselves accordingly.

The new Insights tabs will be available later this week and users will start seeing changes next week. Please send your feedback to developers-help@facebook.com with [notifications allocations] in the subject field.