The Facebook Journal

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.