The Facebook Journal

As Don wrote in a post yesterday, Facebook is having a hard time sticking to the dates they’ve set in the Developer Roadmap. Although, we’ve heard that Facebook is planning to end the Verified Apps program today, still there are no news yet about the new Email feature that was promised to go live in November.

Pete Bratach, who is a technical writer at Facebook and according to his tag-line ”…likes keeping you up to date” didn’t mention the email feature at all in his November 2009 Platform News post today.

It’s a good thing they’ve released that Platform Live Status page where developers get notified about the condition of the Platform. Ever since it was released some major problems have been reported including a severely degraded performance of the Platform, which affected mainly FBML based applications, and problems with the Quick Transitions feature (which is still not fixed, opposite of what the Platform Live Status is saying). Let’s just hope it is all connected with with the upcoming redesign or the roll-outs of the new features and that we will have somewhat of a stable platform for the beginning of the new year.

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.