Since last Wednesday's update, we published a Developer Spotlight on Cooliris, did a recap of Facebook @ GDC Europe: Developer Day and announced winners of HACK the Social Web.
Platform dialogs are all built to run in a variety of display contexts on both the desktop and mobile web. As part of our continued efforts to make these dialogs work smoothly in all contexts, dialogs, such as Feed Dialog, Pay Dialog and Auth Dialog, will now open inline by default as a modal overlay for Canvas and Page Tab apps. These dialogs provide a better user experience than previous pop-up dialogs and do not require the user to turn off pop-up blockers. For more information, please see our documentation.
When working with access tokens, you may need to check what information is associated with them, such as its user or expiry. We are introducing a new API endpoint that will allow you to get this data programmatically, instead of using the debug tool page. To use the API, simply issue an HTTP GET request to graph.facebook.com/debug_token with two parameters: input_token (the access token you want to debug) and access_token (your app token or user token of a developer of your app). For more information, please see the documentation.
With the mobile payments shortcut, you can provide a customized mobile payment flow that simplifies the user experience for purchasing with a mobile device and improves conversion. Instead of offering virtual currency price points that may not be supported on mobile, use this feature to find out what mobile price points are available for users based on their country and offer those as purchase options in your game. Once users make a selection, you can show a mobile-only pay dialog to confirm the purchase, eliminating other payment options from the dialog. Get more details on how to implement this feature by reading our documentation.
Many developers have implemented Payer Promotions and have seen increased payer conversion and revenue. Payer Promotion is subsidized by Facebook and allows you to offer eligible users a discount on your in-game currency, such as $3 of value for free. We previously launched features that allow you to create your own custom unit or use Dealspot to offer payer promotions in your game. Now Facebook will help you promote this offer for a discount on your in-game currency by showing a special banner or premium unit on your game's canvas page.
You can start taking advantage of this feature simply by implementing in-app currency orders and associating your currency with your app. Learn more about how to enable the payer promotion unit on Facebook.com for your game in our documentation.
As announced in July, the following breaking changes will go into effect on October 3, 2012:
Check out the Developer Roadmap for more info.
The "December 2012 Breaking Changes" migration is now available for you to test your apps to see if they will be affected by the breaking changes happening on December 5th, 2012. Check out the Developer Roadmap for more information on what changes are included in the migration.
The following stats are for activity Wednesday, September 12 and Wednesday, September 19
Bugs Activity
Bugs Fixed
Activity on facebook.stackoverflow.com
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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
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 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
"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