The Facebook Journal

As described in an official blog post from Facebook, you can now put an “Add Profile Tab” button in your application or site to prompt users to add your application tab to their profiles for easy re-engagement. All implementations using the JavaScript API can call FB.Connect.showProfileTabDialog or use the fb:add-profile-tab XFBML tag to render the button, while FBML applications can call Facebook.showProfileTabDialog or use the fb:add-profile-tab FBML tag to render it.

Using the JavaScript API for Connect

FB.Connect.showProfileTabDialog(callback);

This method renders an Add Profile Tab button on your canvas or Web page, enabling the user to add your application tab to his or her profile.

If the user already added your application tab, the button doesn’t appear.

You can determine if a user added your application tab by querying the tab_added field in the permissions FQL table.

The optional Callback function can be used to execute after this call completes. It takes one argument, which is a JavaScript object. The object has one key, tab_added, the value for which is 1 or 0.

Using an XFBML tag

<fb:add-profile-tab />

or, if you’re using Connect

<fb:add-profile-tab></fb:add-profile-tab>

Renders a button that lets a user add your application or site’s application tab to his or her profile. Make sure you specify a Tab Name and a Tab URL in your application settings (on the Profiles tab).

If the user already added your application tab, the button doesn’t appear.

You can determine if a user added your application tab by querying the tab_added field in the permissions FQL table.

Update: According to Facebook “The performance and volume of API calls has stabilized at close to normal level”.

The Facebook Platform is down again with the Platform Live Status page all in red. There have also been reports that the entire Facebook network was down as well.
FBML based apps are currently performing the worst and a small subset of canvas apps are not being redirected to their Callback URLs.
It seems that all this happened just after this week’s weekly code-push .

We’ll keep you updated as the situation evolves.

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.

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.

Facebook just banned several ad networks from their Platform. Nick Gianos, a member of the Facebook Platform team explained the move by saying that those providers violated Facebook Policies and Principles. According to Nick Gianos, applications that continue to use the services provided by the above mentioned providers will risk enforcement action.

Here is the complete list of banned ad networks:

Gambit
Social Hour
SocialReach
Tatto Media

Something tells me this list will continue to grow. Just yesterday Facebook announced that they will give time to all the developers to comply their applications with the Platform’s new Policies, but why aren’t they doing the same for ad networks?

The Facebook Platform has just recovered from about 10 hours of degraded performance.

Application developers were complaining about various FBML related problems from as long as 11 hours ago. 6 hours ago it was almost impossible to access a FBML canvas application. The errors ranged from FBML timezone renders to even basic HTML table renders (which by the way still continue to show for various apps). To reduce these kind of errors we suggest to turn off the canvas quick transitions option.

It is noteworthy to mention that today is Tuesday and the performance issues were directly connected to Facebook’s weekly code-push, which occurs on Tuesdays, and that today’s code-push included the updated stream story structure, where stream stories can contain just 1 image with limited number of lines and a Read More link.