Today marks the one-year anniversary of Facebook Platform, which has had a rough childhood and now bears the pimples of adolescence. On the eve of the platform’s birthday, the company gave developers a sandbox in which to apply the Clearasil of its redesigned profile.
Before entering the sandbox, be sure to visit the Sandbox Status page for news and other known issues. At the moment, the sandbox is for developers’ eyes only.
“We believe that the new design makes profiles cleaner and simpler, gives users more control over their profiles, and emphasizes recent and relevant information,” wrote Facebook’s Pete Bratach, in a blog post yesterday.
The design adds new application integration points, which are intended mainly to help developers generate real user activity (as opposed to spam from so-called black-hat apps).
Here’s an excerpt from the documentation showing the key improvements to integration points:
1. New forms of user-to-user communication.
- o New Feed story sizes and types give you more ways to help users share content on their profiles and in News Feed.
- o Publisher integration enables users to easily post content of any type on their –- and their friends' -- profiles. This is a significant upgrade over Wall attachments.
2. Deeper profile integration.
- o Application tabs enable users to share unique content from their favorite deep applications.
- o Profile boxes enable users to express themselves in smaller forms than tabs. Users now have more placements for profile boxes including on the left-hand column as well as on the “Boxes” tab.
- o Application info sections enable users to share structured content from applications on the Info tab.
3. Streamlined install/login flow.
- o A simplified login process should significantly increase the number of users who visit and explore your application.
- o Note: Certain permissions granted on the add page such as adding a profile box or link in navigation will be migrated to new flows in the Facebook user experience.
Facebook recommends that developers migrate their apps immediately, but says old apps will continue to work. They’ll be migrated automatically when the redesign launches in June. Facebook also posted a sample PHP app that it says demonstrates each of the integration points.