What’s New on the Facebook Platform

Iskandar Najmuddin19th January 2011Facebook Developer Garage London

Facebook Developer Garage London

Are you sitting comfortably?

3

WHAT’S NEW ON THE FB PLATFORM JAN 2011

Uh-oh, problems with Data Brokers and aggregators.

• Sale of UIDs - but no actual user data. UIDs are not private data.

• Rapleaf banned from FB platform (forever!)

• A handful of developers banned from FB communication channels for 6 months.

The 3rd Party ID is for sharing with 3rd parties like content providers and advertisers so that they can identify uniqueness.

• Forced deadline of Jan 31

• Available as third_party_id in the Graph API; also as indexable FQL column.

• third_party_id is unique to user + application

3rd Party IDs

4

WHAT’S NEW ON THE FB PLATFORM JAN 2011

November 2010 Rollup Migration• Page Graph object: fan_count renamed to likes.

• All IDs returned as strings, fixes some JSON-decode casting issues.

• likes connection on the Post object will include both the count and the liking users.

• Enabled by default, and forced on for all apps on March 10, 2011

Timezone-less Events• Bug #7210 open since October 2009, resolved in a migration, hooray!

• Events can now return UTC start and end times: E.g. 2010-03-14T21:00:00+0000

Post for Canvas• Facebook’s solution to referer UID leakage.

• Out of beta, enabled by default, forced on on March 10

Migrations

5

WHAT’S NEW ON THE FB PLATFORM JAN 2011

On Jan 31st, farewell to:

• DataStore API

• SMS API

• Custom Tags

• metrics FQL table (use insights instead)

• Permissions API access methods

• FBML - fb:editor, fb:wall, fb:feed (fb:board also doomed)

But pages.blockFan remains.

See http://developers.facebook.com/roadmap/deprecations

Deprecations

6

WHAT’S NEW ON THE FB PLATFORM JAN 2011

Can now change og:type before hitting 10,000 likes

Lots more og:types available

• Facebook continues crowd-sourcing an ontology

og:video, og:audio tags now enabled

• Only whitelisted for video (FLV) to play in feed

• Can specify width/height, and artist/album/title data for audio (MP3)

Tip: Use correct type values for physical objects. If you use article, you won’t have publishing rights and won’t appear on a user’s profile.

OpenGraph changes

7

WHAT’S NEW ON THE FB PLATFORM JAN 2011

Manage Friend Lists

• Create and delete lists

• Add/remove friends from lists

• Needs manage_friendlists permission

Comment connections for ‘likes’

• Get list of User names and IDs

Real-time API for pages, permissions

• Update your app’s Page data when it changes

• If Users remove permissions, update your app to avoid bogus offline API calls.

Graph API updates

8

WHAT’S NEW ON THE FB PLATFORM JAN 2011

Search parameters:• query

• centre (as latitude/longitude)

• radius (in meters)

Example:https://graph.facebook.com/search?q=coffee&type=place

&center=37.76,122.427&distance=1000

Response:

{ "data": [ { "name": "Philz Coffee", "category": "Local business", "location": { "street": "4023 18th St", "city": "San Francisco", "state": "CA", "country": "United States", "zip": "94114-2501", "latitude": 37.760863, "longitude": -122.433326 }, "id": "151116474914629" }, { "name": "Ritual Coffee Roasters", "category": "Local business", "location": { "latitude": 37.75659, "longitude": -122.4211 }, "id": "119185971453428" } ... etc ] }

Nearest Places Search

9

WHAT’S NEW ON THE FB PLATFORM JAN 2011

Targeted Post content will only be visible to users matching your targeting.

• Via Graph API – use the targeting JSON object:

{ "countries": "US", "regions": "6,53", "locales": "6" }

• Country, city, region, and locale data available as CSVs from Facebook.

• Needs manage_pages permission

Targeted Page Posts

10

WHAT’S NEW ON THE FB PLATFORM JAN 2011

Create & delete users, create friend connections• Must use the special Application Access token

• Max of 100 Test Users per application

• Exempt from Facebook spam or fake account detection system

• Can’t ‘Like’ pages or post on Page walls

• Can use app in live or sandbox mode

Create a user with the app already installed and read_stream permission:POST /app_id/accounts/test-users?installed=true&permissions=read_stream

Response:{ "id": "1231....", "access_token": "1223134...", "login_url":

"https://www.facebook.com/platform/test_account.." }

Use the login_url to login as this test user and the access_token for Graph API calls.

Test User API

11

WHAT’S NEW ON THE FB PLATFORM JAN 2011

Connect two test users

• Requires two Graph API calls:1. POST /uid1/friends/uid2

– Using the access_token for uid1

2. POST /uid2/friends/uid1

– Using the access_token for uid2

You can also:

• List all of an app’s Test Users (including each login_url)

• Delete Test Users

Test User API

12

WHAT’S NEW ON THE FB PLATFORM JAN 2011

Platform Dialogs have been normalised and improved for

Feed, Friend and OAuth methods

Using the JS SDK, FB.ui({ method: “method”, … ]);

Direct URL: http://www.facebook.com/dialog/method/?params

Where method is one of:• feed

• friends

• oauth

• See docs for detailed params: http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/dialogs

New Dialogs with FB.ui

13

WHAT’S NEW ON THE FB PLATFORM JAN 2011

Let users sign up to your external website via a Facebook iFrame• Pre-fill user details from Facebook data

• Data returned to your site via a signed_request

Registration Plugin

14

WHAT’S NEW ON THE FB PLATFORM JAN 2011

Q1 2011 – iFrame Page Tabs on the way, we are told.

Q1 2011 – No new FBML applications. FBML on Profile Tabs and existing FBML apps continue to work as normal.

Jan 31st – Deprecations forced

Feb 2011 – Old test user accounts ‘retired’

Roadmap

15

WHAT’S NEW ON THE FB PLATFORM JAN 2011

Other new permissions

• read_mailbox – read inbox messages.

• user_address and user_mobile_phone permissions – but disabled due to outpouring of negative press and user feedback.

And finally

• Single-Sign On added to iOS SDK

• New list of ad providers that have signed agreements w/ Facebook.

• Promotion policies changed – no need for written sign-off from FB.

• App requests in notifications area being tested.

• Facepile now XBML and iFrame enabled.

• Handy new ‘Apps on Facebook.com’ guide for n00bs.

• Goodbye, User Profile Tabs. We knew thee well.

Miscellaneous Bits

Iskandar NajmuddinTechnical Services DirectorSyncapse Londoni.najmuddin@syncapse.comtwitter.com/iskandar020 7096 0146

Thank YouAsk me stuff at the

break