Some of the stream changes on Facebook come into effect next Tuesday.
As Facebook announced on the developer blog on October 23rd (http://developers.facebook.com/news.php?blog=1&story=321), the way that stream stories are rendered is changing. From Next Tuesday one action link will be shown, and only the first 25 characters of that action link. Also formatting characters will be stripped out (things like ”[“, “{” and “|”).
These are not massive changes but they will affect all existing applications and will change how their stories appear.
For more updates and details keep an eye on the Facebook Developer wiki. Here is a link to the developer roadmap – http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/Developer_Roadmap
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. Read entire article.