What’s New on The Facebook Platform?And What’s Next?

Iskandar NajmuddinNudge - nudgesocialmedia.com

Facebook Developer Garage Londonwww.facebookgarage.co.uk

February 24th, 2010

And Now FB is Six

400M users, 50% daily active – Yes, 200M daily active users. 1.6M Active Pages have created 5.3 billion Fans – 20M new Fans every day Average User spends 55 minutes per day on FB

Data and chart from http://mashable.com/2010/02/10/facebook-growth-infographic/

Facebook Chat Goes JabberBut not federated

Integrates well with existing chat – simultaneous web/IM client logins Block users via Friend Lists – same as web-based chat Big AIM/ICQ integration push – siphoning AOL users away? Not federated (yet) – no interop with Google Talk or other Jabber servers

What’s Up with the Dashboard?

Went live at beginning of February. Do you like it?

Getting Content on the Dashboard Use various dashboard.* API methods – addGlobalNews, addNews, publishActivity, etc The {*actor*} token is replaced with current user’s full name and link to profile. Use @:UID syntax to tag another user in your message body.

Limits Message truncated after 50 characters – including actor full name! Action link text truncated after 25 characters Action link text must follow stream publishing guidelines (no formatting characters, etc)

Dashboard Example: News Items

Personal News Item

Global News Item

Dashboard – Global & Personal News

Global News Items Show for all app users

Personal News Items Show for the target user You can create a Personal News Item for a non-app users

The 2 most recent news items will show on the Dashboard.You can supply a custom image to display – the most recent item’s image will show on Dashboard.

Dashboard Example: Activity

Activity Item

Dashboard - Activities

Activities Show for actor’s friends in “Friends’ recent activity”. Don’t show anywhere in actor’s dashboard. Use application logo as image – no custom images allowed Can only target an application user

Dashboard - Counters

A Counter is a number that shows next to your application bookmark.

New API methods to set, get, increment, decrement counter value Counter is automatically cleared if user clicks on Bookmark link

Bookmark & Counter

New Email Permissions

Request a user’s real, actual email address and store it indefinitely** Well, as long as you comply with CAN-SPAM Act/Data Protection etc.

Notifications are gone as of Monday, March 1st

The email extended permission allows you to get an email address from the user FQL table.Quick-start: Set an Email Domain in your Advanced Settings via FB Developer App.At the top of every canvas page, you’ll now get this:

Required reading: http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/Roadmap_Email

New FQL Tables

Privacy – Detailed privacy info for a piece of content. Also see the privacy.get API method.

Like – get a list of users who liked a piece of content

Developer – get a list of app ids by developer user id

Family – get information about a user's family

Video and Video Tag – get videos and tag data

Roadmap Notes

Last call for templatified feed stories – change to stream.publish methods

Photo sizes changed – max dimension is now 720 pixels. Profile pics - from 200x600 to 180x540

User FQL table update (since Feb 8th): relationship_status, gender, and affiliations.status fields only return English strings

Invites and Inbox Filters, new “Share” to Inbox methods – No updates yet, but expected this month.

What’s Next – Some PredictionsGrains of Salt Required

Facebook Credits Facebook Credits system might be opened up for mere mortal developers at f8 Expect to see:

– Subscription-based apps try and fail– Huge increase in consumer acceptance of virtual goods– Lots of new physical-goods gifting/delivery/shopping/catalogue/affiliate apps– More retail brands buying into the FB platform– Good systems for user-to-user transactions – FB Marketplace, Café Press/Etsy-alikes– Backlash against developers who neglect user support– More and better gaming!

Open Graph APIFirst release targeted for Q2 2010 May bring massive quantities of web properties into the Facebook experience Dashboard may include external site/Page Bookmarks Facebook home page and news streams becomes aggregation juggernaut Facebook as a portal - All yer stuff in FB, filtered and shaded by your social graph

Bits and bobs

Preferred Developer Consultant Program - Apply via email, see Wiki page for details:http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/Preferred_Developer_Consultant_Program

The Social Network, a new film coming in October:“A story about the founders of the social-networking website, Facebook.” Jesse Eisenberg to play Zuckerberg.

The f8 conference is April 21-22nd – no word on ticket availability yet. See you there?

More FB open sourciness – HipHop for PHP released (Ask Scott MacVicar about it)

Follow me on Twitter:twitter.com/iskandar

Telephone: 020 7096 0146

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“dedicated social media experts” – Inside Facebook, June 2008

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