The Facebook Journal

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.

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.

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?