Facebook Developers

As part of our ongoing effort to improve our communication with our developer community, we offer you our latest monthly roundup of the announcements, new features, and updates to Facebook Platform that occurred during June, 2009.

New Features

• We released the Live Stream Box, our second social widget. Let your users connect, share, and post updates to Facebook in real time from your application or Facebook Connect website.
• Make your FQL queries even more powerful with fql.multiquery. This method lets you send a batch of queries to Facebook for simultaneous processing, and you can use the results from one query in the batch in another query within the same call.

Updates

• You can now use admin.setAppProperties to set icon_url, logo_url and connect_logo_url properties.
• Due to security vulnerabilities in recent versions of the Flash Player, we increased the sitewide minimum Flash Player version to 9.0.159.0 for Flash Player 9 and 10.0.22.87 for Flash Player 10. Without the appropriate upgrade, no Flash content displayed on Facebook can play.This affects the FBML fb:swf and fb:flv tags, which previously required a minimum Flash Player version of 9.0.115.
• For FBML applications that use multi-friend selectors, you can specify a name for each unique fb:multi-friend-input.
• The album FQL table contains a new column, type, which classifies the album into one of four types: profile, mobile, Wall, or normal.
• You can upload or replace photos with events.create and events.edit by posting an image when making the call.

Announcements

• We changed the policy around who can access the beta site (http://www.beta.facebook.com) so you can test your applications against our weekly code push. Now only user accounts marked as Platform test users can access beta site. We're moving to a model where the beta site will be automatically updated—possibly every day—so that developers can constantly poll the site and make sure your application continues to work with it. By limiting the site to Platform test accounts, we can offer a fully functioning version of Facebook where developers can exercise their applications while limiting the amount of real user data that can be accessed.
• Facebook Connect continues to spread across the Web, and has made its way onto devices like the iPhone. Look for it on the Watchmen Blu-ray disc and soon on the Xbox.

Articles/Videos

• At Facebook Developer Garage London, over 100 developers focused on social gaming dynamics and explored the principles for creating successful social games on Facebook. Watch this short report.
  

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

The Platform team stayed close to home early this month with the Facebook Friends.get Party – Birthday Edition event hosted on our home front in San Francisco. Developers, VCs, and tech luminaries joined us to celebrate the 2nd year of Platform and all the contributions created by our developer community.

Celebrating through education, four Developer Garages took place this month with developers worldwide collaborating and sharing their Facebook Platform experiences. The Facebook Developer Garage program serves as a forum to share information and ideas among developers and build together using Facebook Platform.

In New York, over 450 developers gathered to hear local speakers share their thoughts and best practices on Facebook Connect, the Open Stream API, and Platform. Facebook's Annand Sharma shared the latest news on Facebook Connect and Platform technologies.

Across the ocean in London, over 100 developers focused this month on social gaming dynamics and explored the principles for creating successful social games on Facebook. They looked at how you can apply gaming mechanics to increase engagement and retention in a non-gaming community website.

Down in Dallas, over 200 developers met to discuss Facebook Connect and how best to use Facebook Pages. They delved into a variety of monetization and social media strategies for advertisers to best reach their audience on Facebook.

Meanwhile in China, the Developer Garage Shanghai covered every aspect of Facebook's offerings to developers. Facebook Platform engineer Wei Zhu joined over 300 Chinese developers to share information on Facebook Connect and the latest on Platform. They discussed the principles and philosophies of creating successful engaging social games and examined examples of how these principles had been leveraged to create interesting 3D iPhone Facebook Connect implementations.

If you'd like to host a Developer Garage in your region, please see our Developer Wiki to learn more about the program or check out the Platform Page to find more Garages near you. We look forward to seeing you at a Facebook event soon!

*Special thanks to our hosts Trapeze, Facebook Developer Garage London, CoHabitat, China Social App Developers, and to our sponsor Intel.

As Facebook has grown internationally into a worldwide network, we've come to realize that organizing our users into geographic networks isn't as useful as knowing where a user is currently located. This is especially true from an international perspective, where a region would represent a whole country. To this end, we're shifting our focus to the city where the user currently lives, as this provides more relevant information for friends to share with each other.

Recently we started deprecating regional networks from the user profile. We expect the process to finish within the month. Corporate and educational networks will continue to appear on the user’s profile. For users who haven't specified a current location, we'll populate that field with what was formally their regional network.

What Does This Mean for My Applications?

At this time, nothing will change -- we'll continue to return regional network information for the next 3 months (until September 30, 2009), even though this information will no longer appear on users' profiles starting this week. Moving forward, when you need a user's location information for your application, use the current_location field instead of affiliations.

For calls to users.getStandardInfo and queries on the standard_user_info FQL table, we'll now return current_location for location information. We'll still return affiliations as well, but after 90 days, we'll return only corporate and educational networks for affiliations.

Similarly, after 90 days, for calls to users.getInfo or queries on the user FQL table, we won't return regional networks for affiliations; we will still return corporate and educational networks though.

Note that the user’s current location isn’t used for privacy purposes. You can read more about the user changes on the Facebook company blog.

We'll announce ahead of time when we finally deprecate regional networks from the code and stop sending that data to your applications. As always, we welcome your comments on the Developer Forum.