With the impending removal of notifications, bookmarks have become exponentially more important for developers. With the increased importance for developers, Facebook has announced this afternoon that they are adding an FBML tag for a bookmark button as well as FBJS methods to get users to bookmark your application. The bookmarks will be required in order to show counters within the redesigned navigation which is expected to launch in the next month or so.
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While there was most definitely an initial hit to applications that thrived from the open Facebook feed, it appears that developers are already adapting and many have avoided a dramatic drop in traffic. It’s not surprising as last week I wrote that there would be blood but that developers would overcome the changes. It appears that many of those developers are already coping with the first in a series of changes.
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For any Facebook developer, platform downtime is a fact of life. While Facebook has built a relatively stable platform, there are many occasions where it goes down for a period of time. For developers this can be extremely difficult as they don’t know if there’s a bug in the code, a server issue, or simply that Facebook isn’t working properly. That’s why Facebook launched the new Platform Live Status page yesterday. The service lets developers check whether or not any issues are on their end or on Facebook’s end.
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This evening Facebook released a new PHP library for developers and included in that library are a number of payments methods. Also included are two gift APIs which includes a method for retrieving gifts and one for updating the gifts stored by an application. I would assume that this means Facebook’s release of their payments API and gift shop API is right around the corner. We’ve been anticipating this for a while but these are the first signs we’ve seen.
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A number of the large ad networks have been reaching out to developers to let them know that they essentially have no idea what’s going on. Facebook has taken the latest actions without giving developers any form of early notification and many ad networks feel left in the dark. Those developers that have ad supported business models (the majority of Facebook developers) feel as though their businesses are in jeopardy. The rationale is that if they can’t trust what were previously reliable ad networks, who can they trust?
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Earlier this week, Facebook announced a new tool for developers to enable them to test new implementations of Facebook Connect and to ensure that the service is always running. The tool leverages Waitr, an open-sourced Ruby library for automating internet browsers. It will automatically run browsers for you and provides an interface for quickly navigating and interacting with a web page’s various components. The point is to ensure that Facebook Connect is always working.
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The past two years have been an interesting ride as the Facebook Platform has become more restricted in order to protect the user’s experience. When Facebook first opened up there were countless ad networks and developers looking to seize the opportunity to make millions. Many have generated large sums of cash and a few continue to be extremely profitable to this day but what has been most interesting is watching Facebook carefully navigate the gray policy areas.
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Tonight’s announcement by Facebook was a huge milestone for the company. Developers have been calling for a more open platform and it looks like Facebook has finally decided to give it to them. Included in the updates is not only an open status API which I claimed would potentially kill Twitter, but also shared links which means we will soon see the rise of Facebook news aggregators.

Granted, we don’t have limitless access to shared links, but I think aggregation will really be the key thing resulting from these new features. Through the power of Facebook Connect, companies can also rely completely on Facebook for hosting videos, photos, status updates, news articles, and more. Additionally, this new open layer will allow Facebook Connect communities as well as communities within the platform to create their own content aggregators.
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There’s an increasingly complicated situation spreading through the Facebook platform. The best way of explaining it is by looking back over a year and a half ago when the platform first launched. As many remember, the early days of the platform was the wild west and pretty much anything went. Developers instantly had millions of users and Facebook wasn’t taking any action to stop their growth.

Within a short period of time, Facebook began cracking down. It started with limitations on invitations and then restrictions against applications that were incentivizing invites. As users’ profiles became cluttered with countless applications, Facebook decided that it was time to redesign the platform. Granted, the whole redesign was not just due to Facebook’s desire to avoid cluttered profiles but also as a way for the company to increase ad impressions on the thousands of applications.
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Facebook has been fighting spam on all fronts. Whether it’s hackers and spammers trying to find loopholes in the site’s security, phish user data, or use other malicious techniques, or developers trying to cheat the platform, spam is a big problem. Just last week I posted about the Snowball Wars application which has since been banned. Today I stumbled across an application invite which asked me to install an application. The only problem was that thee of the links say ignore and one says confirm.
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