Netodex

Facebook announced today that they are changing the way that feeds work. The full facebook announcement can be read in their developer blog at Facebook Development Blog.

Here are the key points in English along with a few questions that the documentation doesn’t do a great job of explaining.

First of all there are now two views a user can have, one is a news feed which is basically posts that a facebook algorithm determines are the most interesting. Things like how many comments, how unique it is and how many people ‘like’ the post will play some part. In their words…

* News Feed will focus on popular content, determined by an algorithm based on interest in that story, including the number of times an item is liked or commented on.
* Live Feed will display all recent stories from a large number of a user’s friends.

OK, so far so good, except you can expect to lose some viral traffic where users only view the news feed and facebook has not flagged your feeds as worthy enough to make it.  However according to facebook if these are engaging and interesting then you have nothing to worry about.  Of course how interesting anyone can claim ‘Joe Bloggs has made it to level 5 in the big magic spoon game’ is purely subjective.

The biggest concern is that they are depreciating the template feed system by December 20th 2009.

Hundreds of thousands of applications out there all need to be changed in the next two months! And considering the documentation is hard to follow at best they are not making it easy for the little guys.  But do not fear! We can break it down into English for you.

As of the 20th December the only way to publish feed stories is going to be via the stream publishing methods.(stream.publish, FB.Connect.streamPublish, and Facebook.streamPublish).  That means the following methods will be discontinued and will not work after the 20th December:

* Template bundles. You should start using stream attachments with the stream publishing methods instead.
* feed.publishUserAction
* feed.publishTemplatizedAction
* Facebook.showFeedDialog and FB.Connect.showFeedDialog
* Publisher stories that use templates.
* Feed forms that reference the feedStory form and the multiFeedStory form.
* One-line stream stories.

On top of that the following significant changes to feeds come into effect:

The size of images in feeds are to be rendered at a maximum of 90 pixels high or 90 pixels wide. What isn’t clear in the documentation is whether you have to pass the image at that size or if they will render it at the correct size for you.  Although I cannot find a definitive answer in the docs I did a test of my own and it seems that facebook resizes the image for you – one less thing to worry about.

Stream stories will only display the first image that has been passed to them.  This puts an end to those feeds which display a whole row of images.  If you pass more than one image to the feed the first one will be shown along with a ‘more’ link which will let the user view the additional pictures.

A stream story can have a maximum of one action link, and 25 characters in the link. And according to the developer blog post this change will take effect within the next couple of weeks, so expect to see this in force long before the 20th December.

Facebook do point out that you can still present Feed forms to your users by calling Facebook.streamPublish or FB.Connect.streamPublish which implies that you can create feeds just like the ones that show up now, however if you are using the php libraries you are stuck with getting a user to grant extended permissions.

In the next few days we will be posting code samples to show you how to simply and quickly change your facebook template feeds to the new system and notes about the potential pitfalls and how to avoid them.