We built Facebook Platform to enable people to capture memories and share experiences through the apps they use. Books, movies, TV and fitness comprise an important part of who people are, so today we're announcing new actions to give people better ways to express those things.
The Open Graph supports a variety of popular activities, like watching videos, and we're adding the following new common actions:
This improves developers’ ability to publish the types of activities that people want to share. You can learn more about these actions and the associated objects in our documentation for fitness, books, and movies and TV.
Following yesterday’s news, we've created beautiful News Feed stories on mobile and web to showcase these actions. We want people who use your apps to be excited about how their stories are presented in News Feed – whether they're sharing a major life moment, like their first marathon, or something smaller, like finishing a book they were reading.
We've worked with a variety of lifestyle app developers to tailor the new actions and News Feed stories to meet common use cases. For example, the new fitness stories dynamically update when someone finishes their workout, and early data shows that average likes per story have increased by more than 2x. As we move more apps to use a common set of actions, we’ll be able to further optimize the performance of these stories and the user experience.
All apps that use these new actions will be reviewed to ensure they meet our quality criteria. Any apps that previously used custom actions to represent this type of sharing will need to move to these new actions by July 10, 2013.
Many of the most popular lifestyle apps have added the ability to share these new actions. These include:
In the past, Facebook Platform has evolved to support developers building high-quality gaming, media and music experiences. We're excited to begin providing new ways for fitness, books, movies and TV developers to be just as successful.
Today we announced a fresh, new look for News Feed on web, tablet and mobile. This design aims to make it easier for people to access the things they care about. For developers, this new design improves how the content appears in News Feed and how people can use bookmarks to reengage with apps.
In the new design, the things people share through apps are larger and more engaging in News Feed. We're also making it easier for people to access their game and music feeds, now accessible from the top right area. To take advantage of this new design, we encourage you to optimize for high-resolution feed stories on both web and mobile by providing 600X600 pixel images (minimum 200X200 px).
Bookmarks are now more relevant for people and appear on every page. Bookmarks are an important way for people to reengage with apps, and we've made improvements so people can quickly access the games and apps they use the most. These ever-present bookmarks will also display the notification counter from the most recent game requests to help drive re-engagement with players.
We are beginning a slow rollout of this new design today. We will be testing and closely monitoring key metrics to optimize this experience for both users and developers.
As announced in December, the following breaking changes go into effect today:
When you register a company with Facebook in order to accept payments on Facebook, you are required to provide verification documents if you use 1) a bank account located in certain countries outside the U.S. or Europe or 2) a PayPal account. With this policy update, you will not be able to accept payments from users until your documentation is approved. This is required in order to comply with relevant laws and to continue to ensure a safe ecosystem for both developers and users.
This policy is effective as of April 22, 2013, allowing developers several weeks to provide the necessary documentation. Apps that register with Facebook on or after April 22, 2013, and that do not use a qualifying bank for payouts will not be able to accept payments until their verification documents are approved.
If documentation is required, you will receive a prompt in the company registration flow, and we will notify you via email once we verify your information. You also have the option to change your payout method to a qualifying bank account if you do not wish to submit additional documentation.
Visit our help center for more information on what is required and how to submit.
We have re-opened the apps process to the Preferred Marketing Developer Program with two updates.
In order to focus on high-potential candidates who have proven success working with clients on strategies in-line with our owned, paid and earned media narrative, we are moving to a referral based system where candidates will have to be referred by either a Facebook or Ads PMD employee.
We have also announced new requirements for the PMD badge, pushing candidates and members towards deeper integrations across Pages, Ads, Apps and Insights.
For more information, please see the PMD Badge page.
The following stats are for activity between 02/27/2013-03/06/2013:
Since last Wednesday's update, we launched Facebook SDK 3.2 for iOS, held our first Developers Live, announced March Developer Events, and Join the Facebook Games Team at GDC SF on March 26.
The following changes can be enabled/disabled using the "March 2013 Breaking Changes" migration until March 6th when they will go into effect permanently for everyone:
No more accessing mailbox FQL tables without a user session
It will not longer be possible to access the message, thread, or mailbox_folder FQL tables without a user session.Removing apps from /me/accounts/ and page_admin FQL table
We will no longer show apps under/me/accounts/
in the Graph API or in thepage_admin
FQL table. You can access the list of apps a user is a developer on by hitting/me/applications/developer/
or using theapp_role
FQL table.Removing redirect to docs when hitting graph.facebook.com
We will no longer return a redirect to the Graph API docs when hitting the URLhttp(s)://graph.facebook.com
with no path.
For more information, check out the Developer Roadmap.
The following stats are for activity between 02/20/2013-02/27/2013: