The Facebook Journal

There were a lot of rumours yesterday about this morning’s Facebook announcement but none of them were really spot on.

Facebook announced 3 major things this morning:

1. Download Your Information

2. Dashboard for Connected Apps

3. New Groups

Some sources still say that this is just phase one of their “Lockdown” and there’s more to come soon. We’ll just have to wait and see.

From The Telegraph to TechChrunch to your Facebook news stream. The rumours are spreading. Fast.
According to some reports, Facebook has been in a “Lockdown”, working 24/7 on something secret. These rumours started a couple of months ago when Digg founder Kevin Rose tweeted about rumours that Google is working on a social network to challenge Facebook called Google Me. The tweet has been taken down, video below.

The speculations that Facebook is planning something big caught the attention of the masses when Facebook started sending out the invitations for the event which said that the event is starting 10am on Wednesday and that lunch will be served, meaning that the announcement will take quite some time..

Rumours started escalating, bloggers started predicting, Facebook said nothing.

The main 2 rumours are:
1. Facebook is revamping the chat, adding support for video calls via Skype deal.

2. Facebook has a new design.

The more uncommon ones are:
1. Facebook is going public
2. The launch of Facebook Questions
3. Facebook phone
4. Facebook Photos

Below is a video of Kevin Rose talking about Google Me

TechCrunch is reporting today that Facebook has been on “Lockdown” for the past couple of months working on a major redesign.

The event scheduled for tomorrow and multiple reports of the said “Lockdown” appearing in the press from different sources means that they’ll be unavailing something big tomorrow. Some sources even say that it can be a video-calling feature added to their chat service (powered by Skype). In fact, some users are already seeing a revamped chat window moved over to the left

As described in an official blog post from Facebook, you can now put an “Add Profile Tab” button in your application or site to prompt users to add your application tab to their profiles for easy re-engagement. All implementations using the JavaScript API can call FB.Connect.showProfileTabDialog or use the fb:add-profile-tab XFBML tag to render the button, while FBML applications can call Facebook.showProfileTabDialog or use the fb:add-profile-tab FBML tag to render it.

Using the JavaScript API for Connect

FB.Connect.showProfileTabDialog(callback);

This method renders an Add Profile Tab button on your canvas or Web page, enabling the user to add your application tab to his or her profile.

If the user already added your application tab, the button doesn’t appear.

You can determine if a user added your application tab by querying the tab_added field in the permissions FQL table.

The optional Callback function can be used to execute after this call completes. It takes one argument, which is a JavaScript object. The object has one key, tab_added, the value for which is 1 or 0.

Using an XFBML tag

<fb:add-profile-tab />

or, if you’re using Connect

<fb:add-profile-tab></fb:add-profile-tab>

Renders a button that lets a user add your application or site’s application tab to his or her profile. Make sure you specify a Tab Name and a Tab URL in your application settings (on the Profiles tab).

If the user already added your application tab, the button doesn’t appear.

You can determine if a user added your application tab by querying the tab_added field in the permissions FQL table.

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.

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 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.

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?