The Facebook Journal

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.

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.

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.