This afternoon, Facebook announced the launch of the new Create Application API, which “allows widget providers to programmatically generate” the API key “and other necessary settings” for child applications. Previously, applications like the quiz generators, required users to go through complicated processes for generating new applications. This left many developers in a challenging situation.
For platform developers, many applications have now been forced to lead users through the process of installing the Facebook developer application and then creating new apps. It can be extremely cumbersome and in the process, there is a large number of users which fall off in the process. Widgets, like DISQUS and JS-Kit have been forced to consider whether to bypass Facebook’s application creation process.
Now, with this new Create Application API, developers will no longer have complex processes that developers need to go through for configuring their widgets and applications. The purpose of this new API is two fold: Facebook wants to make it easier to create applications and they also want to make it easier to block parent and child applications all together.
As Facebook states in the developer wiki:
Occasionally, parent applications generate so many child applications that users are unable to effectively control the volume of stories – which is why the ability to hide all quiz applications is one our top user requests. As a result, we are experimenting with giving users the ability to hide all the children of a parent application, for only those applications where there is a significant, demonstrated user demand for such a function.
The result is that users will have more control over the news stories generated by the “create your own” applications.
Great idea, being able to block all of the children of a parent application.
Comment by David Stillwell — October 13, 2009 @ 2:06 pm
Are they going to force the quiz-making apps to implement this?
Comment by Brad Dwyer — October 13, 2009 @ 2:17 pm
really nice
Comment by Rasid Bin Bayu — October 13, 2009 @ 4:15 pm
child applications
sounds abit like they been reading my rants about subapps – a vision that the developer platform that applications such as halloween,gifts be moduler that no one developer owns and ran commitee
could been ran on success stories like farmville and contestable apps like smiles, hugs there thousands off
it also be good if they categorise all fb connect apps away from the mainstream applications directory and add an fb connect badge
Comment by jamie — October 13, 2009 @ 6:07 pm
Good, this will make easy for developers to control the applications.
Facebook applications Developer
Comment by facebook application — October 14, 2009 @ 10:39 pm