January Platform News

One of our biggest goals this year is to continue improving our communication with you, our awesome developer community. One way we hope to do this is by creating a monthly roundup all of the announcements, new features, and updates to Facebook Platform that occurred over the past month.

Here's a summary of the major Facebook Platform news from January, 2009.

New Features

• Extend FBML with custom tags. Check out the custom tags directory to find tags to add to your application.
• FBJS has been improved to FBJS2. FBJS2 is now available in a preview version, and we'll start migrating to our new version over the coming weeks, pending your feedback.

Updates

• Improving application insights. We now count tab views toward your applications' active users. The count occurs on the initial page load of the profile, in addition to a user explicitly clicking the tab.
• You should always store UIDs as 64-bit ints; album IDs and photo IDs are now strings with a maximum length of 50 characters.
• Applications now receive the fb_sig_app_id parameter in requests Facebook sends to your domains. It will be part of the signature calculation.
• The visible field in photos.getAlbums lets your app know who can see an album.
• Starting February 9, 2009, we'll stop passing the ext_send_ss parameter to iframes included in your application that are not within the domain or subdomain of the applications’ callback URLs. If you're relying on this functionality, please make sure you find alternate ways to share the information that utilizes this method. We are making this change to make iframes rendered by fb:iframe more consistent with existing cookie and cross-domain security models.
• You must include the {*target*} token in the MultiFeedStory form template.
• On March 3, 2009, we're deprecating our Marketplace APIs, which will no longer be available.

Announcements

• Welcome to our new Facebook Platform leadership.
• Apple released their iPhoto Facebook Connect integration.

Articles/Videos

• Facebook Connect developers, watch a video demonstrating how to integrate social actions users take on your site into Facebook Feed.

Keep an eye on this blog (or subscribe to the RSS feed), the Platform Status Feed (or subscribe to its RSS feed), and the weekly Push Changes articles for announcements, changes, and other important bulletins.

As always, we appreciate your continued feedback in our Developer Forum -- let us know how we can reach and communicate with you even better.