The Facebook Journal

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

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.