Facebook Developer

New Marketing Tools for Pages

by M. Dorn on July 24, 2012 · 0 comments

Pages are valuable tools for marketing your app or your brand. Recently, we added several powerful features that simplify managing and sponsoring Page posts. All below features are available in both Page admin UI and the API except the first one below, which is a UI shortcut for creating Page post sponsored stories.

Scheduled Page Posts

Many Page admins have requested a way for creating and scheduling page posts to be published at a future time. Now, using Pages Graph API, you can create a page post and schedule it to be published at a future time that is between 10 minutes and 6 months from the time the post is created. If you change your mind about the scheduled publish time of the post, you can change the schedule time or delete the unpublished post so long as the post’s original scheduled publish time is at least 3 minutes away. To create scheduled posts using Graph API see Pages Graph API.

Unpublished Page Posts

Another new feature is the ability to create Page posts that don’t show on your Page’s timeline. Admins frequently want to create Page posts that they can sponsor. However, these Page posts usually contain information that are relevant to only a segment of the Pages’s audience, e.g., 50% off all women shoes in all the bay area stores. Moreover, these stories don’t contain information that is relevant to the Page’s identity and story, which is characteristic of the content that should be on the Page’s timeline. Unpublished page posts allow for posts that can be promoted as sponsored Page posts, but they don’t show up on the Page’s timeline. Such promoted page posts appear only on the right hand side column, and not on the news feed. To create unpublished posts using Graph API see Pages Graph API.

You might ask how you would read a list of all scheduled and unpublished page post through API. Graph API’s Page object provides a new connection, promotable_posts, that lists all published, scheduled, and unpublished Page posts. Also, you can use FQL stream table for this purpose as described here.

Page Admin Permissions

Many Page admins use third party tools for Page content creation, moderation, engagement, or ad creation. These use cases require a Page admin to grant permissions for managing the Page to a third party app. However, usually such an app doesn’t require full admin permissions. For example, imagine an ads management platform that creates page posts sponsored stories and monitors Pages’ insights. Such an app requires permissions for managing ads for the page and reading the page’s insights, but it doesn’t need permissions for creating page posts and monitoring posts’ comments. The Page admin can add the admin of the ads platform as a Page admin with Ads Creator permission. Then, the Page’s access token that the ads management platform receives, will be granted with only managing ads and reading insights permissions for the page. To learn about Page admin permissions see here.

To get started using these new APIs see Pages Graph API.

Source: Facebook Developer Blog

Platform Updates: Operation Developer Love

by M. Dorn on July 21, 2012 · 0 comments

Since last Wednesday’s update, we published a game spotlight on SongPop and shared guidance on how to capture growth by leveraging photos and the Open Graph.

Javascript SDK Cleanup

In the continued effort to reduce the number of unofficial methods exposed by the Javascript SDK, we recently sent out an email to app developers who we believe are using such methods.

If you received such an email please make sure that you review your codebase. This is easiest done by using the app and looking at the developer console in the browser.
Some of you might have received this email for no apparent reason, (some sites ‘borrow’ app_id’s from other apps, developers try out things), and to you we apologize for the inconvenience.

‘Translate your app’ link moving into the Localize tab

We recently launched a new tab, “Localize”, in the App Dashboard. Developers can use this tab to submit translated assets for App Center, as well as any other content that can be translated in their app. As a result we have also moved the “Translate your app” link into this tab accordingly, now available under “Advanced Options”.

Facebook at Casual Connect Seattle

If you’re planning to attend Casual Connect Seattle next week, join us for talks from members of the games product and partnerships teams:

Unlock new frontiers of growth with Facebook
Tuesday, July 24th at 11:00am in the Taper Auditorium
Sara Brooks, Games Strategic Partner Manager, will share insight on new frontiers of growth across geographies, genres and platforms for Facebook games developers, while delving into success stories from developers.

Growing social games across mobile and web with Facebook
Wednesday, July 25th at 10:00am in the Recital Hall
Matt Wyndowe, Games & Apps Product Manager, will discuss how Facebook can be a primary growth engine for your mobile game and showcase examples of how Facebook helped fuel massive growth for FreshPlanet’s music recognition game, SongPop.

October 2012 breaking changes (90-day notice)

The following changes will go into effect on October 3rd, 2012:

Built-in like/follow action required
We will stop allowing the use of Custom Open Graph “like” and “follow” actions now that there are built-in “like” and built-in “follow” actions. Please convert any custom “like” or “follow” actions you may have created to instead use the built-in “like” or “follow” actions.

Removing Bookmark URL – Originally scheduled for December 1, 2011
As mentioned on the blog, this optional field was originally created to help developers track user referrals from app bookmarks. We now pass a ref parameter to let you know that the user is coming from a bookmark (i.e. ref=bookmarks). As such, we will remove the “Bookmark URL” field from the apps settings.

The following change can be enabled/disabled using the “Remove offline_access” migration until October 3rd when it will go into effect permanently for everyone:

offline_access permission removal

The offline_access permission is deprecated and will be removed October 3rd, 2012 (originally scheduled for July 5th). Please see the Removal of offline_access Permission doc for more details.

The following changes can all be enabled/disabled using the “October 2012 Breaking Changes” migration until October 3rd when they will go into effect permanently for everyone:

Removing Live Stream plugin
The Live Stream plugin has been deprecated and will render the Comments Box plugin in its place. While it offers similar functionality, there are a few functional differences. Please see the Live Stream plugin documentation for more info.

Summary field being replaced by description field
Because the two fields were somewhat redundant, we will be removing the “Summary” field (found in the “Auth Dialog” section of an app’s settings) and instead using the “Description” field (found in the “Advanced” section of an app’s settings) in places where “Summary” was previously used.

Removing position field for photos
The position field in both the photo FQL table as well as the Photo Graph API object will start returning 0 for all photos. The photos connection on an Album object in the Graph API will continue to return photos in the order they appear in the album. FQL queries on the photo table that have a WHERE clause containing the aid or album_object_id columns will return in the correct order as well without needing an ORDER BY position clause.

/picture connection will return a JSONP dictionary when a callback is specified
We will start returning a dictionary containing the fields url, height, width, and is_silhouette when accessing the /picture connection for an object and specifying a callback property. Currently we just return the picture URL as a string.

Weekly Stats

The following stats are for activity between Wednesday, July 11th and Wednesday, July 18th.

Bugs activity between Wednesday, July 11 and Wednesday, July 18

  • 206 bugs were reported
  • 48 bugs were reproducible and accepted (after duplicates removed)
  • 13 bugs were by design
  • 19 bugs were fixed
  • 84 bugs were duplicate, invalid, or need more information

Bugs fixed between Wednesday, July 11 and Wednesday, July 18

  • FB.getSession() is undefined
  • Create New Group not listing friends
  • Playlist Sharing on FB Issues
  • Report/Contact developer form does not send “Additional Details”
  • Console error that FB.UA.nativeApp is not officially supported
  • fb logout button moving from right to left
  • Dramatic drop in Like Button Impressions count
  • half of the user cannot load the game, the whole page is just blank white
  • App name issue
  • Alcohol-restricted applications not working in South-Korea
  • Intermitent SSL certificate errors: “Could not create SSL/TLS secure channel.”
  • OAuthException: (#240) Requires a valid user is specified (either via the session or via the API parameter for specifying the user.
  • FB.UI send fails with 500 (Internal Server Error) when sending a link with a sub-subdomain
  • comment box doesn’t work on non 443 port SSL Page
  • Browsing to my app page by username fails with http error 500
  • OG Facepile tag not respecting max_rows
  • fb.api feed: users tag accepted but no user being tagged in the post
  • edge.create callback triggered with delay or no triggered at all with “fb:like”
  • New developer site bluebar is screwed in some conditions

Activity on facebook.stackoverflow.com between Wednesday, July 11 and Wednesday, July 18

  • 461 questions asked
  • 349 questions with a score of 0 or greater
  • 95 answered, 27% answered rate
  • 174 replied, 50% reply rate

Source: Facebook Developer Blog

Capturing Growth: Photo Apps and Open Graph

by M. Dorn on July 18, 2012 · 0 comments

People upload an average of more than 300 million images to Facebook every day, making photos a core part of the Facebook experience. Developers tap into this enthusiasm by creating a variety of apps that make sharing photos more fun and that help people to easily enhance images. They are effectively incorporating Open Graph into apps and tapping into Facebook’s key social points — timeline, news feed, and ticker — to increase referrals, signups and engagement.

The Bigger Picture

PicCollage: A fun app on iOS and Android for creating social photo collages, PicCollage’s Open Graph implementation increased its mobile referrals three fold, its click-through rate by 20% and its weekly active users by 40%. PicCollage has grown through the use of multiple actions, email notifications, the built-in Like action, and prominently featuring Login with Facebook (mobile and web) when the app launches.

Cinemagram: This app brings photos to life through GIF animation and makes it easy to add them to timeline. Cinemagram — which utilizes Login with Facebook, Facebook’s Comments Box and Like button plugins, and enables Open Graph stories with User Generated Action Photos. The integrations have boosted the number of people logged in to Cinegram through Facebook by a fourth to 15% of overall users. People logged into Cinemagram through Facebook are engaged for twice as long as people who aren’t, and they generate 60% to 70% of Cinemagram’s total referrals.

Hipstamatic: “The little plastic camera with the golden shutter” launched an Open Graph implementation at the start of July. Since then, mobile referrals have doubled and daily active users are up 50%. One of the top grossing iOS photo apps, Hipstamatic publishes activity via Open Graph, provides clear user controls for sharing, and leverages timeline so its community can authentically represent their Hipstamatic usage (lenses, films, and gear).

Instagram: Launched User Generated Action Photos in April and mobile based referrals have grown 4x since then. On both iOS and Android, Instagram also launched built-in Like action at the end of June and now one-third of all of its Open Graph actions are Likes, boosting mobile referral traffic 10%.

But these developers aren’t alone, and they’re not just based in the US. PicsArt Photo Studio is based in Armenia and is the #1 free Android photo app, while FxCamera, also available on Android and currently with more than 10 million installs, is based in Japan. Popset and Gifboom also have notable Open Graph implementations (See this Facebook Apps post on Top Free Photo Apps).

Best Practices

Login with Facebook: This is the first essential step for enabling developers to immediately create a social experience and for leveraging Facebook’s key distribution channels. Featuring this option when the mobile app launches helps establish this connection right away. Find more information here.

PicCollage utilizes Login with Facebook when its app launches.

Provide Simple Controls: Enabling an easy publishing experience is important for both developers and people using their apps. People get more value from an app the more they understand it so developers with photo apps that publish by default should provide easy opt-out controls. Find more information here.

Once a person has logged in with their Facebook account, PicCollage enables Facebook sharing with an easy-to-use control.

Hipstamatic prominently promotes timeline functionality and provides easy access for adjusting personal settings.

Hipstamatic uses custom Open Graph actions and objects to allow people to showcase the unique lenses and cameras they use.

Built-In Like: This is the easiest way for a developer to enable sharing from an app. The Open Graph built-in Like action allows developers to build their own Like buttons for mobile or web apps and drive distribution across Facebook. Find more information here.

Instagram’s integration of the Like API drives powerful distribution through Facebook. When a person’s Facebook friends like a photo within Instagram, he or she will see a notification on Facebook.

Open Graph Photos API: This feature enables people to upload, interact with and experience photos through an app the same way they do with any other photo on Facebook. Find more information here.

Using Open Graph, PicCollage’s images get the same design treatment that users expect to see photos on Facebook.

We’ve always been excited about the role of photos on Facebook and we look forward to innovating further on the tools that Facebook developers have available to them so that they can keep creating great apps.

Source: Facebook Developer Blog

Facebook SDK 3.0 Beta for iOS

by M. Dorn on July 16, 2012 · 0 comments

We’re happy to announce a major update to the Facebook SDK for iOS that makes it easier and faster to develop Facebook-integrated iOS apps. We’ve also introduced a new iOS Dev Center so you can quickly access the tools and resources you need to build great social apps for iOS.

SDK features

The new features make the SDK a natural extension of Apple’s iOS environment and make your development cycle more efficient by eliminating the need to develop and manage common tasks. This SDK update is fully backwards compatible with our previous SDK release. Here’s a rundown of the new features:

1. Better user session management: In the past, managing auths, user sessions and tokens was hard. We’ve spent a lot of time working to make these takes easier for you. This release introduces FBSession, which manages, stores and refreshes user tokens with default behaviors you can override. It uses the block metaphor to notify your app when a user’s token changes state.

2. Ready-to-Use Native UI Views: This SDK release includes a variety of pre-built user interface (UI) components for common functions. You can quickly drop them into your apps instead of building each one from scratch or using dialogs. This gives you a fast, native and consistent way to build common features.

  • FBProfilePictureView lets you display a user’s profile picture.
  • FBPlacePickerViewController allows users to query the Facebook Places database to find nearby options and check in.
  • FBFriendPickerViewController, with single and multi-selection options, enables users to easily select friends. This supports filtering friends by device type and application authorization status.

3. Modern Objective-C language features support: With Automatic Reference Counting (ARC), you no longer have to spend as much time on memory management. Support for blocks means that it’s now more straightforward to handle sessions and calls to asynchronous Facebook APIs. This, along with inclusion of key language features like idiomatic API naming and KVO, allows you to transition seamlessly between the Facebook SDK and Apple’s iOS environment.

4. Improved Facebook APIs support: We have enabled batching for SDK requests to significantly improve latency for Facebook API calls, which translates to much faster access times for API requests. Support for strongly typed Objective-C types for graph actions and objects makes programming against the social graph more concise and easier. This combined with our action publishing API makes it easier to publish Open Graph actions to people’s timelines.

iOS 6 Integration

After iOS 6 launches to users, the SDK will automatically use the native Facebook Login in iOS 6 when available. Just enable Login with Facebook and the SDK will ensure your apps work seamlessly on all iOS versions 4.0 and later. The SDK will continue to support the iOS 6 integration in beta until Apple’s user launch later this fall.

iOS Developer Center:

Our new iOS Dev Center will help you learn the basics, get access to the tools you need and understand the key concepts. You can quickly get answers to commonly asked questions – from getting started to building advanced features. The new content includes:

  • Getting Started: Get up and running with the SDK in 6 simple steps.
  • Tutorial: Walk you through building a Facebook-integrated iOS app.
  • Concepts: Learn the basics of building and growing your app with Facebook.
  • Reference docs: Start coding with our documentation and sample code.

Start developing today to take advantage of these powerful new tools and resources. Please share your feedback with us on Facebook’s StackOverflow page with the tag: Facebook-iOS-sdk.

Download the SDK beta with iOS 6 integration now.

Source: Facebook Developer Blog

Platform Updates: Operation Developer Love

by M. Dorn on July 16, 2012 · 0 comments

Since last Wednesday’s update, we announced App Center global rollout, and launched Facebook SDK 3.0 Beta for iOS. We published details on the Photo Hack Day in San Francisco.

Javascript SDK cleanup

We are continuing to reduce the number of methods exposed by the global FB object in the Javascript SDK and are now logging a warning to the console whenever a non-documented method is used. At a later time, these will all be stubbed with empty functions before finally being removed entirely from the FB object. For the list of publicly available methods, please see the Javascript SDK documentation.

October migration now available

The “October 2012 Breaking Changes” migration is now available for you to test your apps to see if they will be affected by the breaking changes happening on October 3rd, 2012. Check out the Developer Roadmap for more information on what changes are included in the migration.

Weekly Stats

The following stats are for activity between Wednesday, July 4 and Wednesday, July 11.

Bugs activity between Wednesday, July 4 and Wednesday, July 11

  • 174 bugs were reported
  • 44 bugs were reproducible and accepted (after duplicates removed)
  • 14 bugs were by design
  • 54 bugs were fixed
  • 78 bugs were duplicate, invalid, or need more information

Bugs fixed between Wednesday, July 4 and Wednesday, July 11

  • Unable to add App Privacy Policy URL
  • FB JS SDK does not refresh cookies & access tokens anymore
  • Facebook Authentication Error code 100: “This authorization code has been used.”
  • the FB.Canvas.setAutoGrow() something not working
  • App Center Submit
  • FB registration plugin validation stopped working
  • Adding attachment causes bug creation to fail to create with a POST 500 server error
  • No longer able to get OAuth token via Facebook in my Windows Phone 7 application
  • Sandbox apps redirecting me to 4oh4.php
  • Login button gives “You have already authorized” response
  • Mobile Comments Plugin – Stuck in infinite loop
  • display=touch forwards to “Page you requested was not found”
  • login-button with registration-url not invoking onlogin callback + does not display as ‘Register’ if user has not authorized the app
  • Bugs losing comments and subscribers
  • Facebook request displays FB Login Button
  • HeroMessagingServerException – No more data to read.
  • App center submission error: missing other language information
  • Edit app lead to page not found
  • Graph API returns user picture as an object when not logged in to Facebook.
  • FB.login does not trigger callback + does not close itself on localhost:8080
  • A document page is completely broken and can’t even click “Report Documentation Bug”
  • Cannot enable Enhanced Auth Dialog
  • Mobile comments are no longer fluid
  • Page Administration not created for webpages when admin clicks ‘Like’
  • Dislpay name cant be changed on AppCenter- Save doesnt “hold water”
  • Basic Settings on Edit App Page Empty
  • Official Facebook WordPress plugin fails to publish actions for Auth Dialog Preview User
  • Sandbox canvas page requires secure URL
  • Unreachable URL warning near comments in bug tool
  • Can’t save advanced settings (There was a problem saving your changes. Please try again later.)
  • Request ID’s not passed when User enters Canvas via Facebook Notification
  • iOS Client Library throws exception while extending access token
  • Error in enable access offline
  • Open Graph action links in Timeline rendered by the FB Mobile apps are broken with App Center release
  • Locale param for iframe Like button causes incorrect like count
  • Facebook raise error, when trying to edit extended preferences of application
  • send dialog changes a https link into http
  • API Error Code: 11 – FB.login failing to work on Blackberry device
  • app request url doesnt contain app request_id parameter when namespace is not defined
  • Image quality is very very poor after upload
  • Javascript SDK URI Error in Android WebView and iPhone UIWebView
  • Malformed FQL query made via api results in all.js error
  • App Request page is broken when ?scrollto= is in URL.
  • iPhone App/iPhone Safari/Android Mobile Browser: Timeline links not redirecting to correct URL
  • FB.ui – loading forever if user is logged in / works fine if user needs to login
  • FB.api doesn’t work at Opera browser when using https connection
  • Post-Authorize Redirect URL issue
  • all.js does not check origin in FB.provide.PostMessage.onMessage
  • Built-In actions can’t be resubmitted
  • Canvas height is not working
  • Facebook API not work in Opera
  • Text direction problem on credit dialog
  • XDomain issues in opera
  • video upload doesn’t work in Hackbook example

Activity on facebook.stackoverflow.com between Wednesday, July 4 and Wednesday, July 11

  • 431 questions asked
  • 332 questions with a score of 0 or greater
  • 109 answered, 33% answered rate
  • 200 replied, 60% reply rate

Source: Facebook Developer Blog

Game Spotlight: SongPop

by M. Dorn on July 14, 2012 · 0 comments

SongPop is a music recognition game by FreshPlanet where people challenge their friends to identify songs and artists. It uses Login with Facebook, so people can play with friends, no matter if they use the app on Facebook.com, iPhone, iPad, or Android.

SongPop is one of the fastest growing and top rated apps in the App Center. Its use of Facebook has helped it increase mobile installs, which drove its rank as the #1 app in both the Apple App Store and Google Play in countries around the world.

Results

  • Installs and engagement. In less than 6 weeks, SongPop has grown from 5k to over 7M monthly active users. More than 2M people play SongPop every day.
  • Broad reach. Open Graph activity drove 20M clicks to SongPop from News Feed, Ticker and Timeline in the last month.
  • Usage on both desktop and mobile. Over 60% of people play it on Facebook.com, and 65% of the mobile users also login with Facebook. In the last month, Facebook users on their mobile devices have clicked through to SongPop over 6M times.

What SongPop does well

  • Friendly competition. Challenging friends is a core part of the SongPop experience. People login with Facebook to find friends to play against and send Requests to notify those people when it’s their turn.
  • Compelling stories. SongPop uses the Open Graph to make it easy for players to share activity and help their friends discover music. The app publishes a variety of meaningful actions like “guessed,” “won,” and “achieved,” which help it grow quickly through News Feed, Ticker and Timeline. These actions are central to the game play, they’re things people are happy to show off on their timeline, and they’re interesting to those people’s friends.
  • A unified experience everywhere. The experience is seamless and consistent for users, as Login, Requests and the Open Graph all work the same way across mobile and desktop.
  • Capturing mobile installs. To drive installs for its mobile apps, SongPop has enabled deep linking in its iOS and Android apps. When people access Facebook on their mobile device, all links to SongPop point to their mobile app. If someone clicks the link but hasn’t yet installed SongPop on their mobile device, they’ll be sent to the Apple App Store or Google Play to download the app.
  • Integrating premium features. SongPop upsells users to a premium experience by giving them a fixed number of uses for free. This helps people understand the value of their premium features. To monetize, SongPop’s integrated Facebook Payments on canvas, In-App Purchases on iOS, and In-App Billing on Android.

Source: Facebook Developer Blog

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