Platform Updates: Bug fixes, Open Graph, and Social plugins

Operation Developer Love Update
We’re continuing to work hard to improve our responsiveness on bugs reported in Bugzilla. In fact, right now, a bunch of us are together in a room going through the backlog of bug reports in Bugzilla. Here’s the progress we’ve made this week. We’ll continue providing this report each Friday.

In the past 7 days:

• 126 new bugs were reported in Bugzilla
• 32 bugs were reproducible and accepted (after duplicates removed)
• 82 bugs were fixed (78 previously reported bugs and 4 new bugs)
• As of today, there are 4,506 open bugs in Bugzilla

We’ve also added new sample code section to the Developer Site, to help new developers get started. Last week, we committed to providing greater visibility into our responsiveness in the forums, but unfortunately were not able to access the detailed metrics this week. We will provide an update next week.

Custom Open Graph Object Types
The Open Graph protocol currently supports 38 different object types, but to better understand and serve developer’s needs, you can now specify your own types. These will be organized in the “other” category on users’ profiles, but we will monitor the most commonly used types and will graduate them to fully supported og:types. Learn more.

Filtering for Activity Feed and Recommendations plugins
Based on feedback from partners, we’ve introduced new, URL-based filtering capabilities for our Activity Feed and Recommendations plugins. This enables websites to use these plugins on category and article pages to only show content within that category. For example, a news website could append ‘filter=tech’ to only show liked content in their tech directory.

Live Stream Content
Developers can now access the content generated in their Live Streams. To access this data, you will need to query the Stream FQL table and provide the “app_id” and optional “xid” for your Live Stream.

Reducing Page Wall Spam
All low quality content posted to Page Walls is now being filtered to a new Spam folder. Page admins can click the Spam button in your Page's Wall filters to view posts have been removed from public view and have the option to unmark as spam. Learn more.

Improving User Experience on Facebook Platform
We are always looking to improve the user experience of Facebook Platform applications. One of our recent improvements was the creation of a system that understands how users react to applications posting to their Stream. This system examines application publishing rates and user responses (did they hide a post from an application, like an application post, etc.). This allows us to not only tune what stories are shown to users, but to determine what applications may be abusing their access to the Stream.

We take user feedback about your applications very seriously. Ultimately our Platform Policies are chiefly concerned with ensuring a great user experience. As such, user feedback plays an important role in determining if an application is compliant with our policies. With this new system in place, we have reduced unwanted posts by 90% and disabled around 7000 applications that violated our policies.

We provide access to user feedback about your application as part of the Insights Dashboard. We encourage you to look at this data regularly to help improve your users' experiences.

Fran is a Product Marketing Manager for Facebook Platform.