This week we launched several new features and how-tos:

• Fluid Canvas and APIs to publish scores and achievements
• How-To: Publish scores and achievements for a user
• Marketing API Program and Power Editor
• Insights for Credits to help efficiently analyze your business
• Ability to manage app roles with Facebook groups
• PHP SDK version 3.1.1 to leverage recent update to the JavaScript SDK

Simplifying Platform Policies

In an effort to further simplify building on Platform – and in response to developer feedback – we are announcing that we have deleted the following two Platform policies this week:

FPP IV.4: You must provide users with an easily identifiable "skip" option whenever you present users with an option to use a Facebook social channel.

FPP IV.5: You must not provide users with the option to publish more than one Stream story at a time.

We removed section IV.4 because it is no longer necessary in light of our existing policy which requires that apps obtain user consent whenever publishing on a user’s behalf.

We deleted section IV.5 to open up opportunities for apps to enable a user to share a story on more than one friend’s Wall at a time. Publishing multiple Stream stories via a single share option can be an effective tool in enabling communication among friends and creating a more natural sharing flow for the user. Examples of positive use cases are enabling users to share gift cards, events, and concert tickets that they have purchased for more than one friend, without requiring the user to click on multiple share options.

Please note the importance of using discretion when providing users with the option to publish more than one story at a time, as this functionality may result in negative user feedback which could exceed our spam thresholds. We highly encourage limited use of this functionality and continued review of your App Insights to ensure that users are responding positively to all Stream stories generated by your app. Additionally, it remains a best practice to utilize Requests as a means for users to invite friends to your app.

While apps must continue to adhere to our policies, we are excited about these changes and think this will create new opportunities for developers on Facebook Platform.

Graph API Explorer support for using your app

You can now use any app which you’re a developer of to generate access_tokens to run the APIs on the Graph API Explorer.

Adding ‘max_age' to activity and recommendations plugins

We are adding a max_age field to the activity and recommendations plugin, which imposes a limit on activity and creation time of articles that are surfaced in the plugins. This allows you to ensure that old and outdated articles don’t show up in these plugins.

Graph API available for checking if a user likes a specific page

As part of our effort to get REST API up to speed with the Graph API , we now allow you to check if a user likes a specific page.

You can check if a user likes a page by issuing a HTTP GET request to:

https://graph.facebook.com/me/likes/PAGE_ID
&access_token=ACCESS_TOKEN

App to User Requests now display messages

Previously, when apps sent notifications to users (available by posting a request to the apprequests connection of the User Graph object, as documented in Social Channels), the bookmark counters were incremented, but the message included with the notification was not shown. As of this week, if you send an app to user notification, we will also display the notification message in the apps or games dashboards. This provides app developers a more effective way to communicate application-level updates to users. Note that the ticker count is now shown in bookmarks, hovercards and, for games, in the games ticker. As a result of this change, your users may see an increased number of notification messages from your application.

As always, we recommend that notifications be limited to only those that have directly useful or actionable content.

Documentation Activity for the Last Seven Days

We updated the FQL documentation for the following tables:

• permissions_info
• note

We updated the FB.ui documentation in the Javascript SDK

88 docs under review

Fixing Bugs

Bugzilla activity for the past 7 days:

• 106 new bugs were reported
• 10 bugs were reproducible and accepted (after duplicates removed)
• 13 bugs were fixed (11 previously reported bugs and 2 new bug)
• As of today, there are 1,105 open bugs in Bugzilla (up 29 from last week)

Forum Activity

Developer Forum activity for the past 7 days:

• 425 New Topics Created
• 188 New Topics received a reply
• 19.68% received a reply from a community moderator or a Facebook employee