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

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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.

The Facebook gifting craze is upon us. Do you receive random gifts from people you do not even know? Are you guilty of sending a snowball, starting a pillow fight, a Christmas decoration, a mixed drink or anything else to your entire friends list? Gift giving is going full throttle on Facebook. Why just say Hello to someone when you can say Hello with an item as well.

Now with our easy to use Gift Giving script you can create your own gift application. You control what gifts are available.

Version GiftApp3.6

Demos:
Jones Soda – http://apps.facebook.com/jonessoda/
All Holidays – http://apps.facebook.com/allholidays/

What’s New in Version 3.6:
- Upload feature for adding gifts. Simply browse and select the gift image and it uploads automatically.
- Help and Ticket system added so users can support a Help request and you can manage all tickets as an admin.
- Multi-Admin. Ability to have multiple admins if you wanted to have friends or partners help manage and add gifts, etc.

What’s New in Version 3.5:
- Categories! Create your own categories and allow users to select categories
from the send gifts tab.
- Admin ability to add points to a user.
- Leaderboard to show top senders and receivers.
- Send tab shows how many times a gift has been sent.
- Ability to add a link to each product that open up another webpage. Great to promote affiliate links or send traffic to a product page.
- Monetize with the program(s) of your choice: OfferPal, SuperRewards, or CPALead.Admin features:
- Only admin can add gifts
- Manage the cost to send each gift
- Add points to a user account
- Create categories for gifts
- Manage support tickets

Fully customizable. You do not have to be stuck with the same gifts. Simply delete the gifts and replace them with something new. Easy to do!

User Features:
- Users of your application can collect gifts. Even if you delete gifts to replace them with a different occassion, a record of sent gifts is still kept and users can view all gifts that they received by clicking the My Gifts tab.
- When a user selects a gift to send the script calculates the cost of the gift and the users point balance and allows the user to send the max amount of gifts at one time to save time.
- Leaderboard to show top senders and receivers. Creates competition between users to get on the top by using your application more.

Self Advertises:
- Viral marketing, advertising
- When a user sends a gift they will be prompted if they want to publish to their wall for others to see that they sent XYZ gift and to who from your app.
- When someone receives a gift sent from your app they too are prompted to publish to their wall advertising what was received, from who, and your app.

Has potential to explode and go viral!

Advertise your business!

Do you have a website you sell products from? How about a brick and mortar store front? Facebook has a huge audience and you can advertise your products by creating a gift application!

Place banners for your business throughout the application, name the application after your business AND make the gifts items you sell!

Your an Italian restaurant? Place items off of your menu as gifts. You sell antique toys online? Place antique toys as gifts. Just about any business can advertise their products using a gift app. Build up hype and get people interested in your business. After receiving a mouth watering pizza or an old toy you remember from your childhood people will look further into the business being advertised.

Affordable advertising! One time fee to buy the software and unlimited exposure.

Affiliates!

If you do not have a business, then promote someone elses! Ever hear of Harry & David pears? They are the world’s best tasting pears! Join as an affiliate of a well known product and create a gift application around their products. Placing your affiliate links and banners throughout the application.

Make money from your application!

Sending gifts costs credits. Users receive credits for free for logging into the app each day and by accepting gifts that are sent to them.

Should a user want to send gifts beyond the amount their credits allow them, then they can buy credits directly or take part in free offers such as singing up for other apps, shopping, surveys and more. This is provided by CPALead, Super Rewards OR OfferPal. Both will pay you for any actions your members do to get points.

Besides integrating with Super Rewards or OfferPal banner ads can easily be placed at the top of every page of the application. Rockyou Ads is a great company that shows Facebook related banner ads. You can even integrate with Google Adsense.

Script Requirements (for hosting)
Regular Shared Hosting
PHP5
1 MySQL Database

Summary:

- You Will Get The Full Script and Complete Setup Guide/Instructions
- Free installation available upon request

Price $30 http://mporgsoft.com/giftapp.php

Create a Gift App using our automated tool,  Gift Artist – http://apps.facebook.com/giftartist/ and we split 50-50 on the ad revenues generated from the ad banners displayed on your app.

We are the only FB app that gives you 50-50 revenue share and the transparency.  You will see the number of ad impressions your apps have generated and how much you have made. Payment is done weekly via PayPal.  If your gift app is promising, we will also spend money and time promoting your gift app.  Create a gift app now and Rock On! No programming needed.

Facebook Journal is giving you the opportunity to write about your own Facebook app/game!
You can post a review of your new app or game, write about recent updates or improvements. To do so, create an account on The Facebook Journal here, log in and start posting! Your posts will be reviewed by our team and should be live in about 1 business day.

You can even include one Google AdSense ad at the bottom of your post!

So what are you waiting for? Write your posts, increase traffic to your apps/games, spread the word and start earning money on The Facebook Journal today!

For more info and tips on how to write, click here.

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.