June 2009 Platform News

As part of our ongoing effort to improve our communication with our developer community, we offer you our latest monthly roundup of the announcements, new features, and updates to Facebook Platform that occurred during June, 2009.

New Features

• We released the Live Stream Box, our second social widget. Let your users connect, share, and post updates to Facebook in real time from your application or Facebook Connect website.
• Make your FQL queries even more powerful with fql.multiquery. This method lets you send a batch of queries to Facebook for simultaneous processing, and you can use the results from one query in the batch in another query within the same call.

Updates

• You can now use admin.setAppProperties to set icon_url, logo_url and connect_logo_url properties.
• Due to security vulnerabilities in recent versions of the Flash Player, we increased the sitewide minimum Flash Player version to 9.0.159.0 for Flash Player 9 and 10.0.22.87 for Flash Player 10. Without the appropriate upgrade, no Flash content displayed on Facebook can play.This affects the FBML fb:swf and fb:flv tags, which previously required a minimum Flash Player version of 9.0.115.
• For FBML applications that use multi-friend selectors, you can specify a name for each unique fb:multi-friend-input.
• The album FQL table contains a new column, type, which classifies the album into one of four types: profile, mobile, Wall, or normal.
• You can upload or replace photos with events.create and events.edit by posting an image when making the call.

Announcements

• We changed the policy around who can access the beta site (http://www.beta.facebook.com) so you can test your applications against our weekly code push. Now only user accounts marked as Platform test users can access beta site. We're moving to a model where the beta site will be automatically updated—possibly every day—so that developers can constantly poll the site and make sure your application continues to work with it. By limiting the site to Platform test accounts, we can offer a fully functioning version of Facebook where developers can exercise their applications while limiting the amount of real user data that can be accessed.
• Facebook Connect continues to spread across the Web, and has made its way onto devices like the iPhone. Look for it on the Watchmen Blu-ray disc and soon on the Xbox.

Articles/Videos

• At Facebook Developer Garage London, over 100 developers focused on social gaming dynamics and explored the principles for creating successful social games on Facebook. Watch this short report.
  

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.