Facebook has decided to make significant changes to the profile mini-feed with the new profile design. The feed is actually the primary focus of the new design and the types of stories that can be posted have expanded. There are now three types of profile feed stories:one line, short, and full. One line stories work just as it sounds: stories are described in short, one-line statements such as “Nick just reviewed a book.” The short stories are “more involved than one line stories.” Facebook renders “short stories in various predefined layouts (like we do today); currently there’s one default layout, but more are coming soon.”
Full stories enable users to be even more expressive with few limitations. The stories can be up to 500 pixels wide and 700 pixels tall and function extremely similar to the way that wall postings currently exist. Pete Bratach posted more details about the change on the Facebook developer blog:
Once the redesigned profiles go live, we’ll begin deprecating the existing Feed publishing API methods (feed.publishActionOfUser, feed.publishStoryToUser, and feed.publishTemplatizedAction). The existing API methods will continue to work during the transition period to the new profiles, so you can publish stories using either the existing API methods or feed.publishUserAction.
During the transition period, you should only publish the story once, so you should make use of the old methods or the new methods, but never both. If you are still using the existing Feed methods once the new profiles are launched, stories posted via those methods will only appear as one line stories to News Feed and the Feed tab on the new profiles.
We’ll announce a cut-off date soon — after that date, the existing methods will no longer be able publish stories to Feeds. You will have plenty of time to update your applications to use the new Feed API calls. We recommend getting started now so you can take advantage of the new features as soon as they go live to users!
To learn more about the changes you can check out the details about feed stories on the developer blog or read the post by Pete Bratach at Facebook.
