Games Round-Up

As a Facebook game developer, here's what you should know about the new features and documentation we released this past month:

New features

• Feed gaming. Now you can share a playable version of your game in news feed and timeline stories, reaching new users through our main distribution channels. Get started with feed gaming by reading our documentation.
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• App Center. We recently announced the App Center--a new place for people to find apps and games through Facebook. An app detail page is required for being listed in the App Center. Follow these guidelines to create yours today.
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• New Insights. Here are some new features within Insights:
• App quality signals. Keep up with user feedback with app ratings and negative feedback.
• Unique users. Know how many unique users see and accept your auth dialog, and see how many publish, view and click on stories.
• Active users. Track the changes in your active user base over time. Follow how active, retained, new and stale users affect your app's growth.
• Referral tracking. We added new fb_source values for traffic coming from news feed and timeline. Check out the list of all fb_source parameters and analyze your referral traffic in the User dashboard of Insights.

Game spotlight: Bingo Bash

People who connect with Facebook on Bingo Bash's iPad app play 65% more sessions and spend 80% more money than others. Find out what Bingo Bash does well.

Best Practices

Make sure you’re getting the most out of Facebook. Read our best practices for requests, news feed, authentication, and more.

• Creating a custom friend selector. Increase engagement with requests and invites by customizing the friend selector for sending requests. Wooga saw a 17.5% increase in the overall number of requests accepted when they implemented a custom friend selector in MagicLand. While we provide a default friend selector for requests, building a custom one for your app lets you create an experience with game-specific art and calls to action. You can also make filtered friend lists with people the user is more likely to interact with. Start building a custom friend selector with our documentation.
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• Making your game social. If you’re just starting to integrate your game with Facebook, follow this tutorial to make your game social with authentication, feed stories for bragging, scores, leaderboards and achievements. You can also find sample code for the tutorial on GitHub.