Monday, November 16, 2009
Prior to the recent homepage change, many developers were loving a massive unfiltered distribution channel of application updates: the Facebook stream. Since the redesign that has all changed, and today Facebook is making one other change to the stream. Previously, feed stories from applications could display multiple images. As of today, multiple images can still be displayed, however the default display will only show one image and require the user to click “See More” to see the full feed story.
It’s a subtle interface change but many developers know that this could have a significant impact on feed dependent applications. In addition to smaller images, developers will also need to keep all action links in feed stories to less than 25 characters. It’s a change which makes the stream look much cleaner however it will also definitely impact some applications.
Most developers have already been forced to adjust to the stream changes as the default news feed is no longer unfiltered, which means today’s impact probably won’t be as significant as the recent homepage changes. Other things which developers should note about today’s changes is the deprecation of a number of methods, primarily those that dealt with the old “feed” object.
Developers should only interact with stream methods for publishing stories. That includes the option of using Stream Attachments which are essentially JSON-encoded key-value pairs. Enough technical speak though! If you are a developer and want to know more about today’s changes you can view Facebook’s blog post from last month.
