Facebook Platform Roadmap Update

We announced a number of new products and updates to Facebook Platform at f8 in April, including the Graph API, social plugins, and support for OAuth 2.0. Over the next few months we will be making upgrades and removing infrequently used parts of Platform to support these new technologies at every level of the stack, while trying to minimize the amount of changes required for existing applications. To keep you posted on the latest efforts to simplify Platform, we’ve updated our developer roadmap and will continue to communicate upcoming changes through it.

Unifying Platform Tools for Applications and Websites

We have a vision for Facebook Platform that is powerful, standards-based, and easy to use across Facebook.com, the Web, and mobile devices. As part of this, we are unifying the Platform technologies used to build on Facebook.com — OAuth 2.0, the Graph API, and the JavaScript SDK — with the technologies used to integrate Facebook into external websites.

First, we are upgrading the authentication mechanism we use for all callback URLs to be based on OAuth 2.0. You can read more about the new signature scheme and can test it out in your own applications by turning on the “OAuth 2.0 for Canvas” migration in your application settings. This setting will become the default for all new applications during the next couple months.

We are also moving toward IFrames instead of FBML for both canvas applications and Page tabs. As a part of this process, we will be standardizing on a small set of core FBML tags that will work with both applications on Facebook and external Web pages via our JavaScript SDK, effectively eliminating the technical difference between developing an application on and off Facebook.com.

We will begin supporting IFrames for Page tabs in the next few months. Developers building canvas applications should start using IFrames immediately. By the end of this year, we will no longer allow new FBML applications to be created, so all new canvas applications and Page tabs will have to be based on IFrames and our JavaScript SDK. We will, however, continue to support existing implementations of the older authentication mechanism as well as FBML on Page tabs and applications.

Finally, due to low usage rates, we will remove application tabs from user profiles in the next couple months. Application tabs will continue to be supported on Facebook Pages.

Simplifying Platform

In focusing on optimizing APIs that are broadly used by developers, we are deprecating the following features and will no longer support them at the end of the year:

• Infrequently used REST API methods
• <fb:editor>, <fb:board>, <fb:wall> and <fb:feed> functionality
• Data Store API

See the roadmap for details.

Cleaning House

We’ve also spent some time cleaning up some of our developer tools and documentation. We’ve simplified the Developer application by removing obsolete settings and tabs, and we have finished migrating the Developer Wiki to our new and improved developer site.

We have a lot of work to do, but we hope these changes will get us significantly closer to our goal of making Platform standards-based and easier to use. We appreciate your feedback in the Developer Forum as we move ahead.

”

The following API methods are deprecated and will not be available:

Infrequently Used REST APIs

• admin.getMetrics
• auth.getappPublicKey
• auth.getSignedPublicSessionData
• auth.promoteSession
• auth.renewOfflineSession
• connect.getUnconnectedFriendsCount
• connect.registerUsers
• connect.unregisterUsers
• fbml.deleteCustomTags
• fbml.getCustomTags
• fbml.registerCustomTags
• permissions.checkAvailableApiAccess
• permissions.checkGrantedApiAccess
• permissions.grantApiAccess
• permissions.revokeApiAccess
• profile.getFBML
• profile.getInfo
• profile.setFBML
• profile.setInfo
• sms.canSend
• sms.send

FQL Tables

• Metrics FQL – Please use the insights table instead.

Datastore API

• data.createObject
• data.createObjectType
• data.defineAssociation
• data.defineObjectProperty
• data.deleteObject
• data.dropObjectType
• data.getAssociatedObjectCount
• data.getAssociatedObjectCounts
• data.getAssociatedObjects
• data.getAssociationDefinition
• data.getAssociationDefinitions
• data.getAssociations
• data.getHashValue
• data.getObject
• data.getObjectProperty
• data.getObjects
• data.getObjectType
• data.getObjectTypes
• data.getUserPreference
• data.getUserPreferences
• data.incHashValue
• data.removeAssociatedObjects
• data.removeAssociation
• data.removeAssociations
• data.removeHashKey
• data.removeHashKeys
• data.renameAssociation
• data.renameObjectProperty
• data.renameObjectType
• data.setAssociation
• data.setAssociations
• data.setHashValue
• data.setObjectProperty
• data.setUserPreference
• data.setUserPreferences
• data.undefineAssociation
• data.undefineObjectProperty
• data.updateObject

Publishing a Tags to a Post

$message = 'From My App: publish steven tags on facebook';

$tag_links = array( array('text' => 'Tags here',
 'href' => 'http://blog.theunical.com'));

if(  $facebook->api_client->stream_publish($message, null, $tag_links))
 echo "Added on FB Wall";
} catch(Exception $e) {
 echo $e . "<br />";

}

Exiting isn’t it.

–Steven

Enter Fan Page List, which is entirely dedicated to ranking the most popular Pages on Facebook as well as rankings for various categories, such as Actors, Politicians, Movies, Games, TV Shows, News, Athletes and more, in real time.

One of the categories that is the most interesting is the list of top brands on Facebook.

Let’s have a look, shall we?

The most popular brand on Facebook is … Facebook, with just over 9 million fans. The only other Internet / technology brands in the top 25 are YouTube (#4 with 5,082,029 fans) and Google (#21 with 1,269,926 fans). Food and clothings brands seem to do much better.

In case you’re wondering why Apple is nowhere to be found in the top brands ranking: the Cupertino company doesn’t even have a proper Facebook Page to begin with (it looks like facebook.com/apple was taken by someone else). Microsoft does, but only comes in at #99 with 117,444 fans. But hey, at least they still made the top 100 list, right?

Here are the top 10 brands on Facebook (for the full list, go here):

1) Facebook (9,024,542 Fans)
2) Starbucks (7,217,370 Fans)
3) Coca-Cola (5,529,595 Fans)
4) YouTube (5,082,221 Fans)
5) Disney (3,475,487 Fans)
6) Victoria’s Secret (3,436,811 Fans)
7) Converse (2,743,227 Fans)
McDonald’s (2,260,698 Fans)
9) H&M (2,045,964 Fans)
10) MTV (1,871,241 Fans)

Post via Tech crunch

It certainly adds up. Over the last few weeks, iTunes has been building out its Facebook Page at Facebook.com/iTunes, which now includes polls, featured items, and is being promoted in iTunes itself.  And Lala, which was acquired by Apple in December, has extensive experience working with Facebook Connect (they also power Facebook’s song gifting feature).

To be clear, you can already share songs on iTunes using both Facebook and Twitter (the feature was introduced last September). It sounds like this integration would make this easier, and there’s obviously the possibly for Apple to leverage Facebook’s social graph in much more interesting ways in the future.

Apple has previously worked to add Facebook support to other apps — iPhoto includes an integrated Facebook photo uploader.

CrunchBase Information

Divvyshot is a group-sharing photo site which takes a slightly different approach than other photo sites. Most photo sites think of the photos as tied to the camera. Odio designed Divvyshot so that photos are tied to places, people, and events. So instead of 50 different shots of the same event, 50 people can all share the same photo. Facebook Photos works on a similar principle, if in a more ad-hoc fashion. People upload photos and tag the people in them. When you get tagged in someone else’s photo, it gets shared with you. If the Divvyshot acquisition is any indication, there will be many more ways to automatically share photos through Facebook in the future.

Divvyshot itself will be shut down. The site has 40,000 active, but loyal, users. Instead, Odio and his team will take what they learned at Divvyshot and apply it to the much larger canvas of Facebook Photos. Existing Divvyshot users will be able to continue to use the site, but no new accounts will be able to be created, and its iPhone app will be taken off of iTunes.

Currently, Divvyshot albums can be edited by multiple users, and can be set as private (only allowing designated friends to upload photos) or public, which lets anyone upload their photos to the album. All photos are presented at a fairly high resolution on the site, and are also available at their original quality for download (you can also download entire albums at a time as .zip files). Divvyshot has deep integration with photo services including Flickr, Facebook and Twitter so you can upload all your photos from these sites. The site recently launched an iPhone app that lets users upload and monitor event activity in real-time and contains much of the core functionality as the web application.

CrunchBase Information

http://divvyshot.com/facebook/

Fresh off the heels of applying for a trademark for Credits, its virtual payment system, the company is now attempting to gain exclusive rights to the use of the term “Facebook Developer Garage”.

In case you’re not aware, Facebook Developer Garage events are developer get-togethers hosted all over the world, which are being described as “a place to explore, get gritty, tinker, experiment, and test out ideas for Facebook Platform”.

Interestingly, Facebook filed for a trademark in three separate classes, only one of them including “sponsoring and organizing online and live exhibitions and events in the field of software development”. I’m not sure if that means Facebook intends to use the term ‘Developer Garage’ for more endeavors in the future or if they’re simply covering all their bases, but here are the descriptions of the two other classes the company applied a trademark for:

International Class 009: Computer software development tools; computer software for use as an application programming interface (API); application programming interface (API) for computer software which facilitates online services for social networking, building social networking applications and for allowing data retrieval, upload, download, access and management; computer software to enable uploading, downloading, accessing, posting, displaying, tagging, blogging, streaming, linking, sharing or otherwise providing electronic media or information via computer and communication networks.

International Class 042: Computer services, namely, creating virtual communities for registered users to organize groups and events, participate in discussions, and engage in social, business and community networking; computer services, namely, hosting electronic facilities for others for organizing and conducting meetings, events and interactive discussions via communication networks; application service provider (ASP) featuring software to enable or facilitate the uploading, downloading, streaming, posting, displaying, blogging, linking, sharing or otherwise providing electronic media or information over communication networks; providing an online network service that enables users to transfer personal identity data to and share personal identify data with and among multiple websites; providing information from searchable indexes and databases of information, including text, electronic documents, databases, graphics and audio visual information, on computer and communication networks; providing temporary use of non-downloadable software applications for social networking, creating a virtual community, and transmission of audio, video, photographic images, text, graphics and data; computer services in the nature of customized web pages featuring user-defined or specified information, personal profiles, audio, video, photographic images, text, graphics and data.

Trademark applications for ‘Facebook Developer Garage’ were filed in the U.S. on the 24th of March, and in Europe on the 29th of March.

One of the new features we’ve been hearing about is the extension of Facebook Connect and the Facebook API to allow publishers to add a “Like” button to any piece of content on their site.

Sound trivial? It isn’t. This is likely part of Facebook’s Open Graph API project that will incentivize third party sites to interact deeply with Facebook by sharing content and associated metadata.

Today you can “share” content with Facebook via a simple button (you can see our implementation at the top of this post). The new Like feature goes way beyond the Share button, we’ve heard.

Good for publishers? Yes. But it’s also very, very good for Facebook as hundreds of thousands of websites will rush to format their content to exactly Facebook’s preference and send over all their data without a second thought.

One way to think of this, says a source with knowledge of the product, is this. Google spends billions of dollars indexing the web for their search engine. Facebook will get the web to index itself, exclusively for Facebook.

Yes, it’s a big idea. Or, as MG put it, the entire Internet will be turned into a tributary system for Facebook. And it all flows from a simple Like gesture, and a few other features we’ll be writing about shortly.

Add FaceBook application to your fan page

Just Go to http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=ID_OF_YOUR_APP.

Find link ‘Add to my Page’ on the left, click on it. Find your page on the list and click on ‘Add to page’ next to this page.

Set Your Application type as WEB

Go to http://www.facebook.com/developers/editapp.php?app_id=ID_OF_YOUR_APP.

Choose ‘Web’ next to ‘Application type’ and click on ‘Save Changes’ button.

Add permissions to your app

Prepare special link:

http://www.facebook.com/connect/prompt_permissions.php?api_key=YOUR_API_KEY&v=1.0&next=http://www.facebook.com/connect/login_success.html?xxRESULTTOKENxx&display=page&ext_perm=publish_stream,offline_access&enable_profile_selector=1&profile_selector_ids=ID_OF_YOUR_PAGE

replace YOUR_API_KEY for an API KEY of your application and ID_OF_YOUR_PAGE for an id of your page

Run this URL in your web browser. Click on ‘Allow’. This will set the permissions to your application to publish on page.

You should see a message: ‘Success’ message.

Check Permissions

Go to http://developers.facebook.com/tools.php?app_id=ID_OF_YOUR_PAGE and check your permissions.

Choose your application, change ‘Response Format’ to JSON, choose method ‘users.hasAppPermission’, fill publish_stream in ext_perm and id of your page in uid.

You should see result: 1.

That means that everything is ok. If the result is 0. then something went wrong.  Then check all the above steps again.

Code To Publish on Fan Page as Fan User Using PHP

Then to publish on fan page as a Fan page user and not the facebook user just follow below code.

For this you need to get Fan page ID:

Example : http://www.facebook.com/pages/Fan-Page/xxxxxxx

where xxxxxxx is the fan page id.

In Steam publish method just replace the $page_id with your above fan page id.

stream_publish($message, $attachment,$action_links, null,$page_id).

<?php

// FB_APIKEY is your facebook application api key
// FB_SECRET is your application secrete key

define('FB_APIKEY', 'YOUR_APIKEY');
define('FB_SECRET', 'YOUR_SECRET');
define('FB_SESSION', 'YOUR_SESSION_key');

require_once('facebook-platform/php/facebook.php');

try {
 $facebook = new Facebook(FB_APIKEY, FB_SECRET);
$facebook->api_client->session_key = FB_SESSION;
 $fetch = array('friends' =>
 array('pattern' => '.*',
 'query' => "select uid2 from friend where uid1={$user}"));

echo $facebook->api_client->admin_setAppProperties(array('preload_fql' => json_encode($fetch))); 

$message = 'From My App: publish steven on facebook Fan Page as Fan User';
$page_id ="xxxxxxxxxxx";
if( $facebook->api_client->stream_publish($message, $attachment,$action_links, null,$page_id))
 echo "Added on FB Wall on Fan Page";
} catch(Exception $e) {
 echo $e . "<br />";

}
?>

Below is the screen where you can see the message published are fan user.

– Steven
Follow Us

A Get Satisfaction support page within your Facebook community

With Get Satisfaction, the fan page is transformed into a powerful source of social knowledge that extends far beyond Facebook. Just as on your wall, the Get Satisfaction App allows customers post questions, feedback, concerns, praise … but before they post, we’ll search all the community and display the conversations, answers, and responses right there inside Facebook. If they post a new topic, that too becomes a part of the Get Satisfaction community.

Leverage the power of Facebook fans — your most social customers — to become a part of your larger customer community. Because all this social content is hosted in the Get Satisfaction platform, it is highly optimized for search engines and can also be syndicated on your website or pushed into your CRM. This new actionable intelligence delivers valuable consumer insight that ripples throughout the organization and into customer service, consumer relations, sales/marketing, R&D, and product development.

Those who already have a Get Satisfaction community and a Facebook fan page can chose from two integration plans:

Social Engagement Hub on the Facebook Fanpage

A custom integration for brands and high volume communities that lets you fully brand the community experience inside Facebook fan pages with:

• Brand customization and banner real estate in the fan page community
• Configurable viral post messaging to maximize acquisition of new fans
• Customizable tab name
• And much more, available upon request…

Support Tab on the Facebook Fan Page – Coming Soon!

The simplest and most effective way for small and medium companies to use the Fan Page App to support their customers on Facebook.