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How the New Stream Affects Applications and Feed Stories

We announced last week that we're improving Feed and Feed forms in order to give your applications more effective and consistent distribution in the stream on the new Facebook home page. Today, we’re starting to roll out these features to users.

One intention with the improvements to Feed forms is to give you the ability to make the most of the stream without requiring you to change your applications or learn any new API calls. If you don't make any changes, your applications will continue to operate as they do today, and even better, stories that are published via Feed Forms will appear more frequently within the stream.

If you want to further improve how your application integrates with the stream, here's a summary of some of the enhancements we've made.

Overview of Enhancements

We've expanded on a few aspects of the Platform API for the new stream:

  • Facebook.showFeedDialog and FB.Connect.showFeedDialog now take two extra, optional parameters:
    • user_message_prompt, which is a text entry field that appears next to the prompt on a Feed form where the user can write "What’s on your mind?".
    • user_message, which is the default text that appears in field for the user's message on the story. You should include this text as the property value of an object.
  • We deprecated the story_size parameter for FB.Connect.showFeedDialog.
  • feed.publishUserAction now can take a user_message parameter that gets appended to any short stories published on behalf of a user, provided the user has specified to allow your application to always publish short stories. Please note that the user_message parameter is not supported with 1-line stories.
  • We made the following changes to Feed stories:
    • Full stories are no longer displayed on the home page or profile.
    • You are no longer required to provide a title for short story templates.
    • We no longer aggregate Feed stories, so you don't need to create an array of templates of a given size or call Feed.registerTemplateBundle.
    • One-line stories will only appear on the Profile in the “recent activity” section. They will not appear in the stream.

Read the Stream Release Notes for the most complete information about improvements with streams, Feed, and the new home page. And keep an eye on this blog and the Platform Status Feed for more details. We'd love to hear your feedback on these changes. Please add your comments to our Developer Forum.