The Facebook Journal

Facebook introduced the  Facebook Developer Roadmap on October 28, 2009. This is what the description of the roadmap reads:

For the first time in this level of detail, we will provide a roadmap to help you anticipate future changes and opportunities. Like all roadmaps, it may shift slightly, but we will share insight into what is happening as these details are available. We’ll keep you posted about the progress of these changes and what they mean for you over the next two quarters.

For the month of November Facebook had 4 new features to be launched, and while most of them are now live, one of the most anticipated ones is nowhere to be seen. I’m talking about the new email sharing feature, which allows developers to gain access to the application’s users’ primary email address. This means that app developers can store real email addresses and contact their users directly. Currently applications can request permission to email users, but the emails get sent via the Facebook API and are not visible and cannot be stored.

Facebook Redesign

Also, once this feature is live, the new notification methods will become active (after 30 days) and most likely this is when the new redesign will be activated.

Facebook just banned several ad networks from their Platform. Nick Gianos, a member of the Facebook Platform team explained the move by saying that those providers violated Facebook Policies and Principles. According to Nick Gianos, applications that continue to use the services provided by the above mentioned providers will risk enforcement action.

Here is the complete list of banned ad networks:

Gambit
Social Hour
SocialReach
Tatto Media

Something tells me this list will continue to grow. Just yesterday Facebook announced that they will give time to all the developers to comply their applications with the Platform’s new Policies, but why aren’t they doing the same for ad networks?

Even though we all knew it was coming, the updated policies will disappoint almost every application developer on Facebook.

As announced in the Facebook Developer Roadmap, the Facebook Platform Guidelines are now replaced with the new Developer Principles and Policies.

As a Facebook Platform Policy Team member wrote in a blog post earlier today, they are giving developers until December 16th to comply their applications with the new rules.

By having a quick look at the Examples and Explanations page for the new Policies, you can see that Facebook is shutting down each and every effective way for developers to promote, advertise and expand their app. And this is only the beginning as per the Roadmap Facebook is going to shut down all the effective channels that apps use to communicate with users as well.

Are you a developer on Facebook? What do you think about these changes and how do you think it will affect the Platform?

The Facebook Platform has just recovered from about 10 hours of degraded performance.

Application developers were complaining about various FBML related problems from as long as 11 hours ago. 6 hours ago it was almost impossible to access a FBML canvas application. The errors ranged from FBML timezone renders to even basic HTML table renders (which by the way still continue to show for various apps). To reduce these kind of errors we suggest to turn off the canvas quick transitions option.

It is noteworthy to mention that today is Tuesday and the performance issues were directly connected to Facebook’s weekly code-push, which occurs on Tuesdays, and that today’s code-push included the updated stream story structure, where stream stories can contain just 1 image with limited number of lines and a Read More link.