The Facebook Journal

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.

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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?