Facebook Developers

Privacy is at the core of Facebook.

Because we provide users with rich privacy controls and respect their choices, users feel safe using Facebook to share their information with their friends. By opening up Facebook through Platform, developers have the opportunity to innovate on top of this information. In exchange, developers commit to treating user information with the same respect that users expect of Facebook. Our Developer Terms of Service strictly limit use of user data and serves as guidelines to these expectations.

Facebook works to help clarify standards and maintain user trust in applications available on Facebook through technical and manual means. Recently, we suspended Top Friends, one of the most popular applications on Facebook. This application violated user privacy by displaying some profile data to people who should not otherwise have been able to see the information. Though the application developer insists that this violation was not intentional, the seriousness of the violation required us to take immediate action.

We don’t take lightly that millions of users lost their access to this application. Because so many people interact with Top Friends on a daily basis, our immediate action to suspend the application was vital in protecting users and assuring them that their confidence in Facebook and the applications on Facebook Platform are well-placed.

This situation demonstrates the importance for continued vigilance on our part and the part of developers who build applications on Facebook Platform. In the coming weeks, we will be increasing our efforts to educate the developer community about our specific policies and the policies and programs developers need to put in place in order to uphold the guiding principles of Platform.

Facebook Platform is a tremendous opportunity for us as a community to provide great social applications to the world. All of us – Facebook, developers, and users – share a joint responsibility to ensure respectful and transparent experiences on Facebook.

f8 registration is now live!

Please join us at f8 '08 for an awesome day of learning, hacking, collaboration and diversion. The Platform team is working hard to put together eight hours of rich content for you this year, and we are incredibly excited about the community coming together.

Event Details:

Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008
12:00 - 8:00 pm

Space is limited so please sign-up ASAP as registration will close once we reach capacity. Register before Monday, July 7th, for the early-bird fee of $150; after July 7th the fee will be $250. A limited amount of student tickets are available for a $50 fee.

More information is available on the Registration Page.

Exhibitors:

Interested in exhibiting or sponsorship opportunities at f8?
Email f8exhibit@facebook.com.

Press:

Qualified press can send an email to f8press@facebook.com to request a pass.

Questions:

Email f8@facebook.com.

We’re changing the Feed API method set, which we feel will lead to better Mini-Feed stories while simultaneously offering many opportunities for the aggregation of stories for News Feed.

As you already know, the most significant change to the publishing model is that we’re separating template bundle registration and Feed story publication. You register your template bundles ahead of time, get an ID for each bundle, and then publish Feed stories with those template bundle IDs later. This is replacing method. By now, you've had a chance to experiment with the new API methods and gained a sense as to how your applications can make use of the new methods to publish Feed stories to the user's Mini-Feed.

Up until now, we've limited template bundles to include just one of each template type (one line, short and full). Now we're extending the definition of a template bundle to increase the likelihood that all of your stories appear in a user’s friends’ News Feeds as well as that user’s Mini-Feed. When calling feed.registerTemplateBundle, you can now supply an array of one line templates, an array of short story templates, and a single full story template. We're encouraging you to include multiple templates for one line and short stories in each bundle. The full details of the changes are outlined on the Developer Wiki.

At the moment, feed.registerTemplateBundle supports both the old style and new style registration models. However, soon we'll deprecate the old style registration models and require one line and short story templates to be expressed in array form. You'll also note that the data returned by feed.getRegisteredTemplateBundles and feed.getRegisteredTemplateBundleById have changed in structure ever so slightly, advertising the fact that template bundles now include an array of one line and short story templates. From the developer's point of view, works exactly the same way.

We feel these new aggregation opportunities will be good for all developers—from those of you working on applications that have hundreds of thousands or even millions of users already, to those just getting started or have only a handful of users. In particular, the least flexible one line and short story templates can be made generic enough so that even small applications are likely to get an application story into someone's News Feed. Applications enjoying a larger user base might even see aggregation using the most flexible template. In fact, we hope that larger applications will forgo the temptation to include very generic templates, knowing they'll see plenty of aggregation opportunities against the more user-specific ones.

Contacting Us

We always want to hear from you about the new design and your experiences trying it out. Please report any bugs you see in the new design. Make sure you use the New Profile category. You can help us solve your issue faster by adding one of the following components to your report: Feed, Info Sections, Profile Boxes, Publisher, and Tabs.

You can send us your feedback and ask questions in the New Profile and Related Changes section of the Developer Forum.

As you may have seen on the Facebook Profiles Preview Page last week, we're launching the new profile design in July. We've been going over all the feedback we've received from our developers as well as our users, and have been incorporating some of the valuable feedback into our design.

Launching in July gives us more time to make sure we release the best possible profile design to our users and developers. And this gives you even more time to add more integration points and features to your applications in the beta sandbox.

On that note, we're eager to see what you're creating for the new profile design and would love it if you would submit screen shots showing off your new tabs, profile boxes, and Publisher add-on. We may feature some of the best ones. We'll keep your screen shots confidential and will ask your permission before sharing any of them. Send along your screen shots (please keep them smaller than 500KB, in PNG or JPG format) with a quick note to developer-feedback@facebook.com. Please put [screenshots] in the subject line.

New Metrics

This week we're rolling out new metrics to help you to monitor the success of your applications. We've already started recording 7-day and 30-day metrics, and these numbers will let you track your applications' usage over week-by-week and month-by-month periods.

These two metrics are very important for many applications, as not every good application has its users interacting with them on a daily basis. Rather, they can be just as engaging when a user interacts with them regularly every few days or even a few times a month. For example, applications with many users that highlight rich content like books or movies might not see as much relative activity on a daily basis as applications with higher daily usage, but their overall metrics increase when the activity window is extended over longer periods of time.

The new metrics we're tracking on a weekly and monthly basis include:

These metrics will appear in the Facebook Developer application, but may be surfaced elsewhere soon. As we add more metrics to this set, we'll announce those changes here.

We’re still finalizing the design for the API calls and FQL tables that will let you get these metrics. We'll document the API and FQL changes later this week. Look for the announcement on the Platform Status Feed.

Contacting Us

We continue to want to hear from you about the new design and your experiences trying it out. Please report any bugs you see in the new design. Make sure you use the New Profile category. You can help us solve your issue faster by adding one of the following components to your report: Feed, Info Sections, Profile Boxes, Publisher, and Tabs.

You can send us your feedback and ask questions in the New Profile and Related Changes section of the Developer Forum.

On May 24th, 2007, we launched Facebook Platform in front of 800 developers and industry leaders. Since our inaugural f8 event, we've seen the rapid growth of our developer ecosystem:

We are excited to invite you to save the date for this year's f8 conference on Wednesday, July 23rd, in San Francisco.

Space will be very limited for this event so please continue to watch this blog for updates on registration. More information on travel, agenda and a ton of other cool stuff will be available on the f8 '08 Page (become a fan for updates). Please post any questions to the discussion board, and we'll get back to you as soon as we can.

Also, please feel free to post your videos, photos and favorite anecdotes from your experiences with Facebook Platform from the last year (to the f8 '08 or Platform Page).

Hey Developers! We're excited to be heading out to Graphing Social Patterns - East next week to deliver a keynote called "Poke Back: Facebook Live and Interactive." This is a new format we're giving a try, and we're excited to answer your questions live. And, wanted to remind you that you can submit questions right here on Facebook at:

www.facebook.com/gsp

Here's all the details:

Poke Back: Facebook Live and Interactive

(Wednesday, June 11th, 10:30 AM - 11:15 AM)

Come join the Facebook Platform team for an interactive keynote panel where YOU drive the discussion. Here's your chance to find out everything you've ever wanted to know about Facebook Platform including our latest addition to it, Facebook Connect. Ben Ling, Dave Morin, Ruchi Sanghvi, and Josh Elman from the Facebook Platform team will field and discuss all the development issues and ideas you'd like to learn more about. This panel will be moderated by Dave McClure. For a detailed description click here.

Last week we announced the changes we're making to simplify how users first interact with new applications. We've received a lot of questions and concerns so we'd like to take some time to answer the most common questions.

How are sessions changing?

The Facebook Platform API will grant your application an active session key every time a user begins interacting with your application. This session key lasts for up to 1 hour after the user stops using the application. You can continue to use this key for any functions that require an active session. Any time the user returns to your application, we will automatically either grant a new session key or (if it's still active) extend the lifetime of the existing session key for that user. Additionally, many methods that require session keys today are changing so they no longer need them and you can call them without an active session.

What API methods can I call without a session?

We're keeping a running list of methods that no longer require a session key on the Developer Wiki. However, the list isn't complete as it doesn't include those API calls that we haven't changed yet. So here's the current list of API calls that won't require a session key as of July 15.

Please note that we’ll keep reviewing this list and may add more calls over time.

Also, bear in mind that we're still updating the code, so some of these calls currently need a session key to function in the sandbox. We'll let you know (in this blog and on the sandbox status page) when we make those changes.

You'll still need an active session when you want to publish an action on behalf of a user -- for example, to send a notification to one user on behalf of another user. But your application will be able to send a notification directly to a user without an active session.

How is the application installation process changing?

We're simplifying how a user interacts with your application for the first time. Rather than a complex set of choices required to add your application, we want to make simpler so the user can just make a one-time authorization of your application before using it. Once the user has authorized the application, it will always appear in her Applications list, so she can return to it any time. You will be able to publish Feed stories and send notifications as soon as she authorizes the application.

As the user engages with your application, she can integrate it more deeply into her profile by adding a profile box or a tab, and opting in to receive email. You can offer these integration points (which we described in greater detail last Friday) when a user is interacting with your application by using new FBML tags (which we’ll publish once they’re completed).

What happens to my existing users' settings and permissions?

Nothing – they stay the same. Profile boxes are migrated as described on the Developers Wiki. If a user currently receives email from your application, then you can continue to email that user.

Is the authorization screen you posted on the blog the final design?

The screen shot we included with Friday's blog post, like other screen shots we've posted these past few weeks, is a current work in progress and does not represent the final design. You can see how we're communicating the profile redesign to our users by checking out the Facebook Profiles Preview Page.

Contacting Us

We continue to want to hear from you about the new design and your experiences trying it out. Please report any bugs you see in the new design. Make sure you use the New Profile category. You can help us solve your issue faster by adding one of the following components to your report: Feed, Info Sections, Profile Boxes, Publisher, and Tabs.

You can send us your feedback and ask questions in the New Profile and Related Changes section of the Developer Forum.

Last week, we at Facebook celebrated the one-year anniversary of our f8 conference, where Facebook Platform was launched. It’s been quite a year, with over 24,000 applications built on the platform and over 400,000 developers building new social experiences. We see about 140 applications added to our directory per day, and nearly all of our users have added at least one application. It’s been humbling for us, and incredibly exciting.

On the anniversary of our platform launch, we want to give back to the developer community. As Facebook Platform continues to mature, we’ve been hearing from a lot of you that you’d like more tools and better information on how Facebook Platform actually works. As a starting point, we’re open-sourcing a significant part of Facebook Platform, including most of the code that runs Facebook Platform plus implementations of many of the most-used methods and tags. This release is just a first step in providing you a look into Facebook Platform, and we hope you’ll help us iterate on and improve it. You can find more information and the Facebook Open Platform downloads on our Facebook Open Source page at http://developers.facebook.com/opensource.php.

The goal of this release is to help you as developers better understand Facebook Platform as a whole and more easily build applications, whether it’s by running your own test servers, building tools, or optimizing your applications on this technology. We’ve built in extensibility points, so you can add functionality to Facebook Open Platform like your own tags and API methods. We’re also hoping you use Facebook Open Platform in ways we’ve never thought of – just as you showed off your creativity with Facebook Platform, we hope this lets you be creative with the foundation of the platform itself.

Most of this release is licensed under the Common Public Attribution License (CPAL). The CPAL is community-friendly and reflects how software works today by recognizing web services as a major way of distributing software. It also enables you to connect your brand to ours as you make modifications and updates. The rest of the code is licensed under the Mozilla Public License (MPL).

We encourage you to make the ecosystem even stronger by sharing what you’ve built with other developers. You can check out our community forums at http://forum.developers.facebook.com/.

We’ll keep working to give you the best platform for building great user experiences, and we’re looking forward to seeing what you build with Facebook Platform in the future.

Thanks for a great year – we can’t wait for the next one!