Facebook Platform News 2/17/10

We've recently rolled out four new FQL tables, added a new field to a fifth table, and released new features giving users more control over their privacy on Facebook Platform.

New FQL Tables and Features

FQL is a powerful, flexible, and faster way for you to get Facebook data to your applications. We're always looking for more ways for you to query for the data you need instead of calling the RESTful server. We've released some new FQL tables recently and have updated the album table.

• privacy: This table returns the user's privacy settings for a video, note, link, photo, or photo album. See below for more details.
• like: This table returns a list of IDs of the users who like a video, note, link, photo, or photo album.
• developer: This table returns a list of application IDs for your user ID.
• permissions_info: This table returns more descriptive information about an extended permission.

Also, we added the can_upload field to the album FQL table. This lets you check to make sure the user can upload to a given album before you try uploading a photo on the user's behalf.

Platform Privacy Settings

Users can now set privacy for content they post through your applications and Facebook Connect implementations with the same detailed level of control that they have with Facebook itself. These privacy controls are available in your Publisher integrations and Feed forms.

In addition, you can prompt users to set the privacy for content that differs from their default settings when your application, on behalf of a user:

• Publishes directly to the stream with stream.publish.
• Uploads videos with video.upload.
• Creates new albums with photos.createAlbum (users can now customize the visibility of content beyond friends, friends-of-friends, networks, and everyone).

Users always have control over who their content is shared with via "Posts by Me" in their privacy settings and through the Publisher and Feed forms for specific pieces of content. When you want to display content a user has created, check the privacy for the content by querying the object_id in the privacy FQL table or by calling privacy.get.

By giving users greater control over how they share from your applications we hope they will feel more comfortable sharing a wide variety of content with the audiences of their choice, and begin sharing even more. These controls extend to applications and Connect implementations of all kinds, including desktop applications like Seesmic. In the coming weeks, Seesmic will be adding additional privacy controls to Seesmic Web and Seesmic Dektop.

Stay Informed

Keep checking the Developer Roadmap so you can have advanced notice of what we're releasing for Facebook Platform. We also publish a weekly article that lists each week's code check-ins that impact Platform.

We hope you start using these features and we welcome your feedback on the Developer Forum.

Pete, a technical writer in the Facebook Developer Network, wants you to embrace FQL queries.