Still looking for a ticket to Facebook’s F8 developer conference at the Concourse Exhibition Center at San Francisco Design Center Thursday, September 22? Then make sure you’re online Friday at 9 a.m. Pacific Standard Time.

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Did you know that reporting bugs to Facebook can make you money?

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At a recent press event, Facebook Director of Game Partnerships Sean Ryan had some choice words for Google Plus, his new competition in the social gaming landscape.
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Today, Facebook announced a redesigned developer application to make it easier to update basic app settings all in one place.

A Facebook spokesperson told us via email that the streamlined user interface shows the different app integrations (web, app on Facebook, mobile devices, page tab) and walks developers through the fields needed to get started.

To see the changes, click on edit settings for an app. The new layout includes settings (with basic and advanced sub-menu items), roles and credits.

The basic page gives developers one place to configure settings and provide a summary page for the app. The settings build a simple “Hello World” app on Facebook platform.

The top banner of the page has the app name, image, icon, app ID and app secret. Upload a 75×75 pixel app image by hovering over the app image to edit it. Or, click on the edit icon link next to the icon to upload a new 16×16 pixel app icon.

Then, fill in the basic info section with information that applies to all app integrations.

• The app display name is the user-facing name of the app.
• App namespace is the short app name used for the Canvas Page URL (apps.facebook.com/YOUR_APP_NAMESPACE).
• Contact email is the primary address that Facebook uses to contact you.
• Category describes the app’s content.

The last section allows developers to choose how their app integrates through Facebook. Select whether you own or want to build a website, an app on Facebook, a native mobile app, or a page tab app.

The advanced page includes the rest of the settings such as authentication, migrations, security, advanced canvas settings (visible only to apps on Facebook) and contact info. Roles and credits remain the same.

The updated developer app went out to a limited number of developers today and will be available to everyone over the next week, according to Facebook’s official developer blog.

This is part of Facebook’s Operation Developer Love, an ongoing effort to provide new features based on feedback. Other recent changes include the ability to add and manage test users and the ability to use Facebook groups to manage app roles.

Readers, what do you think of the new changes to the developer app?

Google Plus is obviously still in testing mode, despite its impressive growth. But if the search-engine giant really wants to up the ante in its competition with Facebook, here are seven features the veteran social network boasts that are not yet offered by the newcomer.
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Lujure is giving out free Facebook applications for small businesses. After launching on January 1st of this year, at barely six months old, the company now has 13,165 subscribers. The paying ones are forking over between $5.49 and $195 per month.
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How will Facebook’s announcement that it is phasing out its app directory in favor of a search-based approach impact users of the social network hunting for apps? Probably not much.

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Facebook appears to have fixed the system that had shut down a host of applications two weeks ago, although that hasn’t reinstated every single one of the apps.

A spokesperson for Facebook explained via email:

We’ve listened to developer feedback and made some changes to our systems. Specifically, we’ve rolled out a news feed tab in isights to show positive and negative feedback; we’ve shifted to disabling only the impacted channel when detecting excessive negative user feedback; and we’ll now place apps in disable mode rather than deleting them.

Like Engineer Mike Vernal describes this on Facebook’s developer blog:

We recently launched some changes to those systems that over-weighted certain types of user feedback, causing us to erroneously disable some apps. While we quickly re-enabled those apps, we realize that any downtime has a significant impact on both our developers and users. Many of our developers have chosen to build their businesses on top of Facebook, and we take that responsibility very seriously.

Today we’re launching improvements to our enforcement systems that will provide more user feedback directly to developers and will use that feedback to shape app distribution in a more granular way:

• Better user feedback metrics. Today, we’re starting to rollout a “News Feed” tab in Insights to show you both positive user feedback (e.g., comments, likes, clicks) and negative user feedback (e.g., hides, marks as spam) on your content. The red and green areas of these graphs will provide guidance on whether your app is generally in good standing or whether your app is receiving a significant amount of negative feedback. We will be adding more granular Insights for other channels in the coming months.
• Granular enforcement. When our systems detect an excessive amount of negative user feedback, we will look to disable only the impacted social channel. For example, if an app is generating a lot of negative feedback via chat messages, we will take action only on that app’s ability to publish to chat but otherwise leave the app intact. Developers will be able to appeal these granular enforcement actions.
• New dsabled mode. If we need to disable an app (e.g., it is receiving negative feedback across multiple channels), it will now be placed into a disabled mode rather than being deleted. While disabled, users will not be able to access the app, but the developer will still be able to access and test the app, edit settings, and view Insights. Developers will continue to be able to appeal having an app disabled.

Facebook has been testing a denser news feed running along the right-hand column of some users’ home pages; an example appears to the right.
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