Prior to the recent homepage change, many developers were loving a massive unfiltered distribution channel of application updates: the Facebook stream. Since the redesign that has all changed, and today Facebook is making one other change to the stream. Previously, feed stories from applications could display multiple images. As of today, multiple images can still be displayed, however the default display will only show one image and require the user to click “See More” to see the full feed story.
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Despite casual public acknowledgement of the impact of Facebook killing off notifications, many developers have been scrambling behind the scenes. The reason is that Facebook’s upcoming changes make it practically impossible for developers to re-engage users after they’ve visited an application for the first time, unless they bookmark the application. Yesterday I suggested that Facebook’s new Bookmark button would help curb some of the impact of the upcoming changes. At the time we failed to notice one other subtle change by Facebook.
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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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At the Facebook Developer Garage last week, Facebook announced that they would be shutting down the Verified Apps program, instead holding all developers to the same standards. It’s a renewed focus on ensuring that Facebook Platform applications provide a positive user experience. This morning Facebook reached out to those developers that had been part of the program with the following email:
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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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Last night Facebook announced that a new version of Adobe’s ActionScript library for the Facebook Platform was released. For those developers building robust flash applications, this new library will most definitely be a welcomed upgrade. According to Justin Bishop, the new library provides “support for translations and the latest Facebook Platform APIs, like fql.multiQuery, the Comments API, and Inbox API.”
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There’s a running “joke” among industry insiders about one of the ad network companies, who’s founders need bodyguards. The reason is that they’ve received death threats and are harassed as a result of the deceptive ads being run on their network. It’s not really that funny though because it’s true. It’s the part of the seedy side of the social platform business and while not all developers are deciding to participate, it’s big money which brings in over $1 million a day for some of the ad networks.
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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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Today Facebook will announce the upcoming changes to the platform which we highlighted earlier this week. While we aren’t going to be able to make the developer garage, Mike Arrington has already highlighted some of the upcoming changes, one of which is massive: “apps will no longer be able to publish to notifications.” Developers have spent the past two years optimizing their notifications strategies to drive most of their traffic.
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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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