Over 100 developers joined the Facebook and Heroku teams for our joint hackathon in San Francisco, Hack the Social Web. Attendees had two days to hack on social web apps with Heroku and Facebook, demoing on each day for feedback to improve their apps. We saw 15 great projects. Two teams really impressed the judges and walked away with grand prizes:

Gut is an Windows Phone app that suggests apps you might like based on apps you and your friends have liked or reviewed. Gut combines ratings from app stores and your friends, so you can get opinions from lots of people or just the people you know. Sign up to learn about their release.

Our second winning team, Charades, created a fun, live charades game using Facebook and the OpenTok API. Players sign in and join a video chat room, where they're placed on a team to guess words or phrases their friends are acting out. We’re excited to see the game develop—and had fun playing along during their demo!

Thanks again to everyone who joined us in San Francisco. We hope to see you at the next HACK!

In August, the Facebook games team hosted a Developer Day at GDC Europe, where we were joined by more than 300 game developers who build for mobile and desktop. For those of you who could not join us, we've provided a rundown of the day, as well as links to videos, presentations and code samples.

Growing Social Games with Facebook: Lessons from European Partners

Julien Codorniou, Head of Games Partnerships for EMEA, gave opening remarks on growth from the region. In fact, 5 out of the top 10 Facebook game developers worldwide are from EMEA (versus 1 out of 10 a year ago). Julien highlighted success stories from Wooga, King.com, Plumbee, Nordeus and FreshPlanet, and gave his insight on how to benefit from Open Graph and using Facebook as a growth engine for mobile.

Watch the video

Building your next generation social game with Facebook

Matt Wyndowe, Product Manager for Games & Apps, talked about the state of the Facebook games ecosystem. Matt noted that with more than 130 games with over 1 million monthly users and new features to improve app discovery, such as the App Center, that the games ecosystem is as diverse as ever. He also announced that the App Center has become a significant driver of installs to games and apps, second only to news feed.

Matt was joined on stage by Riccardo Zacconi, CEO of King.com, and Leonard Frankel, business development lead at Plarium, who each spoke about their experience driving growth for their games with Facebook. Zacconi explained how Facebook helped their new iOS version of Bubble Witch Saga quickly reach the Top 10 in the Apple App Store in many European countries without any promotion or marketing. Frankel discussed monetization strategies for Plarium's core game, Total Domination, which reached a seven figure annual revenue run-rate after two months on Facebook.

Watch the video

Simple steps to build & grow a social game on Facebook.com

With over 235M users playing games on Facebook.com every month, developers of all sizes are finding big audiences on Facebook. In his technical talk, Colin Creitz, Partner Engineer for games, walked through the essential steps to build and grow a social game on Facebook.com, including authentication, inviting friends to play, bragging through the feed dialog, and Open Graph built-ins for scores and achievements. Get started quickly with code samples for these features below.

Presentation . Code sample

How mobile games can plug into Facebook for massive growth

Facebook has helped many mobile apps grow and acquire new users. For example, in July, Facebook sent people to the Apple App Store and Google play more than 170 million times. In his talk, Ali Parr, Partner Engineer for games, walked through the basics of how to integrate Facebook into your native iOS game using our new iOS SDK. Ali shared best practices and code samples for using Facebook for login, reaching users via news feed, inviting and re-engaging users with requests, using the Open Graph built-in for scores, and optimizing for cross-platform. Get started making your mobile game social right away with the code sample below.

Watch the video . Presentation . Code sample

Driving installs and re-engagement with Open Graph

Open Graph has driven installs for fast-growing mobile games like SongPop and has been a source of significant re-engagement traffic for popular games like Marvel’s Avenger’s Alliance. In this talk, Gareth Morris, Partner Engineer for games, discussed techniques and best practices for using Open Graph to acquire new users and keep existing users coming back to your game. He also demonstrated how to differentiate your game by creating meaningful custom stories for news feed and Timeline.

Watch the video . Presentation

Advanced features for getting the most out of Facebook

Many game developers have found that building with Facebook results in growing their user base and keeping users engaged. In this talk, Gareth Morris and Namita Gupta, Partner Engineers for games, discussed advanced features you can use to accelerate your growth with Facebook. They covered best practices for using Insights to measure performance and guide development, using social channels to drive growth and retention, and how and when to use ads and other promotional tools to amplify your growth.

Watch the video . Presentation part 1 , part 2

Turning players into payers: best practices for monetization

The most successful games on Facebook aren’t always the ones with the most users. Developers like KIXEYE are outside of the top 10, 20, and 50, and are making millions of dollars a year by finding a meaningful and engaged audience. Colin Creitz, Partner Engineer for games & payments, discussed best practices for monetizing your game using features like subscriptions, displaying a user’s local currency, promotions for converting players into payers, among other techniques to grow your business with Facebook.

Watch the video . Presentation . Code sample

Thank you from the Facebook team

Thank you to everyone who joined us for a successful day of learning, coding and discussion.

Cooliris, an app for iOS, lets people browse through their various image collections, bringing photos from Facebook, Instagram, Picasa, desktop, and mobile together in one simple interface. People can quickly find photos they like, make new albums and share with friends on timeline, news feed or by email.

Results

• High distribution. Just three weeks after launching their app, Cooliris users viewed 2 million photos on Facebook.


• Fast adoption. Cooliris users have published nearly a half-million Facebook actions since the app went live earlier this summer.


• Engaged users. People who log in with Facebook share and comment twice as much people who don’t. They also spend about 35% more time on Cooliris than other users.

"The Facebook platform makes it easy for us to acquire and engage users with a simple sign up process and the ability to provide a deeply social experience with your friends' photos. With Open Graph, we seamlessly enable sharing of the content our users create together on Cooliris,” said Sebastian Blum, Cooliris vice president of business development.

What Cooliris does well

• Seamless connection to friends.. When people log in with Facebook, they can immediately see friends’ photo collections and share on timeline and news feed.





• Quick collaboration. Facebook Login lets people quickly create conversations and invite friends to make photo albums together.



• Easy photo picking. People can select, organize and publish photos from the Cooliris camera roll and post them to Facebook with Open Graph.



• Fresh content. With Open Graph, Cooliris can publish to news feed, timeline and ticker-- encouraging people to respond and install the app.

Updating the Facebook SDK with support for iOS 6.0

Today, Apple released the final build of iOS 6.0 to developers. We're working on an update to the Facebook SDK for iOS that includes support for the iOS 6 integration. We know you are excited about getting iOS 6.0 support in the SDK, stay tuned for the release announcement.

Option to suppress notifications for Like stories

Earlier this fall, we announced the built-in Like action, which allows you to publish Like stories via the Open Graph. When publishing a like from your app, there are scenarios where notifications might be duplicated between your app and Facebook. For example, if you build an app where one Facebook user can like another Facebook user's recipes, your app may want to send a push notification to the recipient of the like. However, if you publish the like to Facebook, we may also send a notification to that recipient. You can now set a parameter to suppress the Facebook notifications for published likes. See our documentation to learn more.

Update to privacy policy requirements

We have updated our privacy policy requirements to require you to include a link to your app's privacy policy in any app marketplace that provides you with the functionality to do so. This is in addition to the existing policy which required developers to include a link to their privacy policy in the Developer App. This change is effective immediately. Refer to our policy for more details.

Upcoming Breaking Changes

As announced in July, the following breaking changes will go into effect on October 3, 2012:

• Built-in like/follow action required
• Removing Bookmark URL
• offline_access permission removal
• Removing Live Stream plugin
• Summary field being replaced by description field
• Removing position field for photos
• /picture connection will return a dictionary when callback is specified

Check out the Developer Roadmap for more info.

Bugs activity between Wednesday, September 5 and Wednesday, September 12

• 234 bugs were reported
• 118 bugs were reproducible and accepted (after duplicates removed)
• 11 bugs were by design
• 27 bugs were fixed
• 160 bugs were duplicate, invalid, or need more information

Bugs fixed between Wednesday, September 5 and Wednesday, September 12

• Reauthenticate not calling redirect_uri after successful user reauthentication
• too many faces in like-button plugin
• Album thumbnails not appearing correctly in like box
• fb_ref is missing in timeline links
• comment plug-in redirect bug
• Yahoo! user comment actions result in login box that goes nowhere
• Update Like button status after login?
• Wrong like count on like button
• Feed Targeting Fails for some Criteria
• App Setting -> Payment page not loading
• Calls to ?ids=me stopped working ~ 02:00 GMT - BadMethodCallException
• Enabling the Timezone-less Events migration breaks Page Event Pictures at Event creation time
• send dialog link problem
• "adpreviewcss" APIi method returns incomplete CSS
• Feed Dialog without User Message not Showing up on Timeline
• Polls in the Like Box are cutoff due to excessive width assigned (and images displayed disproportional)
• Test User Login from Android always says Down for required maintenance
• Like Button Post To Facebook Not Working
• App insights not updating
• 500 Server Error on Oauth for valid domain
• Activity Feed shows "listened to" instead of custom OG Actions
• Facebook request failed (HTTP status code 502)
• stream.publish no longer working within App
• Facebook credits payment flow is failing at payments_status_update
• FB.Event.unsubscribe not working
• Facebook graph api doesn't return cover photo
• Could no longer post to wall / friends wall

Activity on facebook.stackoverflow.com between Wednesday, September 5 and Wednesday, September 12

• 404 questions asked
• 324 questions with a score of 0 or greater
• 94 answered, 29% answered rate
• 173 replied, 53% reply rate