This week, we announced updates to our Messaging API to bring it inline with our our new messaging product. In addition, we published the following updates:

Recent Activity stories now exposed via FQL and Graph API

Until now, non-intentional stories about recent activity in a user’s stream were not completely surfaced through our APIs. Recent activity stories are those generated by the Facebook system, and not those directly posted by the user. Examples of non-intentional recent activity stories include friendship stories (“Dhiren Patel is now friends with Piyush Mangalick and 2 other friends.”), attending event stories (“Cat Lee is going to . . .”), subscription stories (“Dhiren Patel subscribed to Steve Wozniak's updates.”), and liking stories (“Piyush Mangalick likes a link.”).

These stories, along with tags of people mentioned in the stories are now available through the FQL stream table and the Graph API Post object (generally retrieved via the /me/feed and /me/home connections). To access these stories, you must enable the “Include recent activity stories” migration for your application under the Advanced Tab in the DevApp:

Once enabled, this feature will return recent activity stories, plus users and pages tagged in those stories, via the story and story_tags fields. The story field is simply the text of the story, such as “Dhiren Patel likes Marmot.” The story_tags field contains information about the people and pages tagged in the story, and is in exactly the same format as the existing message_tags field on the Post object. For example:

{
 . . .
      "story": "Dhiren Patel likes Marmot.",
      "story_tags": {
        "19": [
          {
            "id": 101961456910,
            "name": "Marmot",
            "offset": 19,
            "length": 6
          }
        ],
        "0": [
          {
            "id": 1207059,
            "name": "Dhiren Patel",
            "offset": 0,
            "length": 12
          }
        ]
      }, 
 . . .
}

Each tag within the story_tags field is indexed by its offset to where the object is referenced within the story field. Each value then contains the Facebook ID of the page or user that is being referenced, along with the name, offset, and the length of the reference within the story field.

See the documentation for the Post Graph API object and the stream FQL table for the full details.

High score stories are now shown for Games when you publish via the Scores API

We have added support for high scores stories to be shown in the Canvas ticker. If you are publishing scores in your game via the Scores API users will now see high scores stories display once they earn a score greater than the previous high score. Note high scores are considered all time high and persist even when you reset the scores for your game.

There is no additional development required to start using high scores stories; if you are already publishing scores today you will start seeing these stories begin to display immediately.

Location now available on Posts

The Graph API Post object now includes location information whenever it is available. We also updated the /feed and /home connections on the Graph API User object to include any location associated with posts. Post objects returned when querying these endpoints will return a place field in the JSON which includes information about the Facebook page associated with the location:

{ 
 . . .
     "place": {
        "id": "110506962309835",
        "name": "Facebook HQ",
        "location": {
          "street": "1601 S California Ave",
          "city": "Palo Alto",
          "state": "CA",
          "country": "United States",
          "zip": "94304",
          "latitude": 37.41761460129,
          "longitude": -122.15007660582
        }
 . . .
}

See the documentation for the Post object for the full details.

Upgrading old Comments Box users to New Design

If you are still using our old Comments Box, next week you will automatically be upgraded to the newer design being used by the vast majority of our users. The new design is cleaner and more fully-featured: it includes threading, ordering by reputation, and moderation by administrators. No action is required on the part of users of the Comments Box to get this upgrade.

Bugs

Bugs activity for the past week:

• 203 new bugs were reported
• 37 bugs were reproducible and accepted (after duplicates removed)
• 61 were duplicate, invalid, or need more information
• 14 reported bugs were as designed
• 10 bugs were fixed

Facebook Stack Overflow Activity

Activity on facebook.stackoverflow.com this week:

• 469 questions asked
• 127 answered, 27% answered rate
• 227 replied, 48% reply rate