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Faster, Simpler Requests

January 26, 2011ByDerek Brandao

Requests are one of the key communication channels on Facebook Platform. Today, we're announcing a new, faster Requests Dialog that is easier for developers to use and enables people to send more relevant requests.

We’ve made the new Requests Dialog perform better by making it faster, removing an unnecessary step in the process, and getting rid of the allocation system that previously influenced the number of requests each user could send. Instead of imposing limits, we’re focused on promoting high-quality, relevant requests and continuing to evolve our spam detection systems to eliminate abuse.

The new Requests Dialog is easy to implement, as it uses our Platform Dialogs framework. In addition, the dialog was designed to work for IFrame apps, and no longer requires server-side FBML. You can generate the Requests Dialog with the following code:


<html>
    <head>
    <title>My Great Website</title>
    </head>
    <body>
      <div id="fb-root"></div>
      <script src="http://connect.facebook.net/en_US/all.js">
      </script>
      <script>
         FB.init({ 
            appId:'YOUR_APP_ID', cookie:true, 
            status:true, xfbml:true 
         });

         FB.ui({ method: 'apprequests', 
            message: 'Here is a new Requests dialog...'});
      </script>
     </body>
 </html> 

Which will display the following to the user:

The new Requests Dialog is part of our ongoing effort to make the Platform experience more relevant, social and efficient for users so they can get started with your apps and share them with friends easily. While the old FBML-based Request Dialogs will continue to work for some time, we encourage you to update your app to support the new version and move to iframe based apps, as previously announced. Let us know what you think in the comments below.

Derek is a engineer on Facebook Platform.


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