The Facebook Journal

I’m happy to announce the release of the iPhone Web App version of The Facebook Journal.

To use the web app, just navigate to thefacebookjournal.com on your iPhone’s web browser. The app represents a streamlined version of the website with an interface  specifically optimized for the iPhone.

For more info about the web app, visit Apple’s Web Apps gallery.

In a recent blog post Facebook encouraged users to be trustworthy and to create great user experiences.

The deadline for enforcement of the new Facebook Developer Principles and Policies has passed and now all the application developers that violate those rules will be punished. The actions taken against the apps will range from simple warnings, suspension of certain functionality to the outright disablement of the app according to the “severity” of the violation, the developer’s history of compliance and the impact of the violation on the users of the application.

These new changes to the Developer Principles and Policies will slow down the growth of new applications significantly. The auto pop-up permission requests, bookmark reminders will be considered as violations. The stream stories can no longer be used as methods for users to invite friends to the applications and soon Facebook will disable all the viral channels of communication (notifications, requests) and leave developers with only the dashboard counters and the Inbox.

Added to this, as outlined in the Facebook Developer Roadmap, Developers will be able to obtain the users’ primary email addresses and the formatting of the canvas will change to better outline the brand of the application. To me this looks like Facebook is slowly “pushing away” the applications from Facebook.com to better highlight that they are the creations of third party developers, not Facebook itself.

Update: According to Facebook “The performance and volume of API calls has stabilized at close to normal level”.

The Facebook Platform is down again with the Platform Live Status page all in red. There have also been reports that the entire Facebook network was down as well.
FBML based apps are currently performing the worst and a small subset of canvas apps are not being redirected to their Callback URLs.
It seems that all this happened just after this week’s weekly code-push .

We’ll keep you updated as the situation evolves.

Facebook has just announced that the new Dashboard API is now available for testing. According to the dashboard roadmap the Facebook Dashboard API lets you integrate your application into the Application Dashboard or the Games Dashboard (depending upon the type of application you have). These dashboards help users discover and engage with your applications on Facebook. They display which application’s users and their friends recently used as well as any news your applications wish to communicate to users.
The Dashboard API integrates with the Games and Application Dashboard in two ways: It gives you the ability to post news items to a user’s dashboard, providing information to the user and giving the user the opportunity to take action. It lets you set a counter as a lightweight way for you to inform your users to take action within your application.

There will also be two types of news that the applications can post on to the dashboards – Global and Personal News Items. Global News Items will be visible to all of the users of the app, while the Personal News Items will be a way to communicate with only 1 user of the app.

Games Dashboard

The Dashboard API lets you set the counters that appear next to your application bookmark under the profile picture (if the user bookmarked the application) and in news items on the dashboard. The counter informs the user in a lightweight way to take an action in your application.
After you set the counter for a user, Facebook clears the counter when the user clicks your application’s bookmark. However, when the user visits your application’s canvas page, you must call dashboard.clearCount to reset the counter.

Also, in this week’s code push Facebook updated some API calls (events.invite, group FQL table), so that they can now work without session keys.

Facebook announced about their new Privacy Settings earlier today. Facebook says that the changes are made to simplify the Facebook privacy settings and give users more control,  but according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation these changes are made to push users to publicly share even more information than before.

For app developers these changes will be very useful. Users won’t be able to hide information such as gender and friend lists (and other Publicly Available Information – PAI) from apps, they can’t opt out of the Facebook API (by the “Do not share any information about me” setting) anymore and even if a user hasn’t granted permission to any apps the PAI of the user will still be available through the friends of the user who use the application.

According to Chris Cox (VP, Product Management) “everyone” will be the new default for status updates, which will make Facebook more like Twitter and give greater access to information for developers. This means if Facebook allowed Google to pull user status updates for its new real-time search,  Facebook could have replaced and even eliminated Twitter.

Below is a video demonstrating these new changes.

Google announced today, at their Search event,  that its new real-time search will also include status updates from Public Profile Pages, aka Facebook Pages.

No word yet if it will include Application Profiles or not, but for now it certainly won’t include user Profile updates.

This can really increase the significance of Facebook Pages and events like the streaming of Alicia Keys’ new album on her Facebook fan page can be accessible (and searchable) for a broader audience.

Google Realtime Search

Facebook has just announced the formation of a Facebook Safety Advisory Board.

According to Facebook the Safety Advisory Board is “the latest step in its commitment to improve safety on Facebook and across the Web”. The Facebook Safety Advisory Board consists of a group of five leading Internet safety organizations from North America and Europe that will serve in a consultative capacity to the company on issues related to online safety. The five organizations on the board are Common Sense Media, ConnectSafely, WiredSafety, Childnet International and The Family Online Safety Institute (FOSI).

The board will come up with ways to better educate teachers, parents and teens about online safety and will address more issues regarding safety on Facebook.

Are you a developer on Facebook? Have you created the most amazing Facebook Application or game but nobody knows about it yet?
Ask us to review your app today!

In the submission page, make sure you describe your application and tell us why do you think it has the potential to become the next killer app on Facebook. Describe all of its features in detail and most importantly include the link!

Good luck!

We’re giving you (our first readers) the opportunity to form the future of Fappside.

What would you like to see more of on Fappside? Is it reviews, platform news, tutorials, all of them or maybe something very different?

Now you can vote and have your say on the future of Fappside!

In addition, we’d always like to hear from you, be it news tips, comments or suggestions.

Yes. Facebook will deprecate all previous feed publishing functions after December 20, 2009 and your applications need to move to the OpenStream API by then. The new API implements the Streams feature, which is based on the Activity Streams standard. That’s not news. And nothing after this point is news anymore, but a short tutorial on how to get ready before Facebook deprecates a few functions which your application might be using, eventually destabilisng it. One short tip at the end of it all for your application.
So as per the new Streams functionality rolled out a few days ago across all Facebook profiles, as an application, you will need a special permission, publish_stream, to automatically publish stories to a user’s wall which is visible to the user’s friends. You need to ask for that permission by prompting the user. Until you don’t have that permission, you can use the FBJS call Facebook.streamPublish to render a feed form and have the user approve or cancel the publishing of the story right there.

As I reckon, employing the FBJS call might be a better thing to do as users may not readily give your application permission to print stories to their walls whenever you want. In fact, let me present the case of why you should ONLY use the FBJS call for all the feed story publishing needs in your application.

What Facebook.streamPublish does is show a feed form to the user which has two choices, either to publish the story contained in the form to the user’s profile or skip it. And before I proceed on feed forms, a legal advice here. You cannot show feed forms to the user whenever your application feel likes, but you have to present the user a choice as he/she takes any action on your application, if they would like to have a feed story printed on their profile page and then only. The clause that mandates this behavior is DPP.VI.1 which says “You must not display a Feed form unless a user has explicitly indicated an intention to share that content, by clicking a button or checking a box that clearly explains their content will be shared.”. Moving on, a typical feed form looks like this:

You can supply the title(Fappside.com – Facebook News), the link of the title, the description text, thumbnail paths which will be resized to 90×90 pixels, other custom properties(Founded and Category), and action links(Become a Fan). The arguments have to be passed in a JSON array alongwith some other parameters. The function is of the form:

I will detail two parameters only, the rest you can find explained here.
auto_publish: If this is set to true, and the currently logged in user has already given your application stream_publish permission, the user won’t see the feed form and instead the story will get published automatically. If you set AUTO_PUBLISH false, the feed form will show up no matter what.
target_id: This argument tells on whose behalf to submit the story. If this is set to null, it defaults to on behalf of the user currently logged in. If it is the ID of a Facebook Page and the currently logged in user is the admin of that page, the story is published to the wall of the Page, on behalf of the page.

Here is some example code to print a story using Facebook.streamPublish in PHP, FBML & FBJS. I am assuming you have a application already set up and you have a FBML canvas page.

The above setup will print a feed story that looks like this by default:

and like this when the See More link in the feed story is clicked:

That’s it with the Facebook.streamPublish method. Do let me know in the comments section if you find anything while doing this yourself, interesting or annoying. Now onto the tip I promised.

This is actually handy and we have been looking for it since sometime. The Add Bookmark feature on the application canvas pages, instead of relying on the humility of the sole link in Facebook’s bottom navigation bar with the application icons to work its magic. All you have to do now is embed the FBML <fb:bookmark /> on your canvas pages and a pretty button will be rendered. It even works on profile tabs. If the user has already bookmarked your application, Facebook will know that beforehand and won’t show the button. There may also be situations where you want to know in your code if a specified user has bookmarked your application or not, and for that use the following FQL query, where $uid is the ID of the user you want to learn about.

I think I have talked enough uptil now. I am looking for topics to write on that may interest you, so if you already know what you like to see, holler here and I will take note, and might do something. Looking forward to a conversation now with you in the comments section.