Major changes are coming in the Facebook API - February, March, April 2013

Have you recently received alerts from Facebook apps? With the meaning of "we have changed something here in the API, so perhaps the application will soon start working incorrectly”.

The fact is that not so long ago Facebook introduced a new practice Breaking Change Policy (if in Russian, then something like “Policy of critical changes”). The social network notifies developers about upcoming “rearrangements” in the API, which, accordingly, requires changes in the code of already existing applications. And that will need to be considered when developing new ones, naturally. Facebook encourages developers to subscribe to the blog , so as not to miss anything important.
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In the meantime, about the most urgent changes that have already begun to be introduced or will be implemented very soon (tomorrow, February 6th - the beginning of the first stage of changes).

February 6, 2013

Facebook will no longer show custom actions in the activity feed. Instead, the social network has pumped standard tools for sharing user actions - they will need to replace their individual practices:



Facebook assures that the majority of user actions will not be affected by the change; it will affect only those actions related to the activity tape.

For example, if earlier your application published a link in the user's tape every time he watched a video in the application, now instead of this record an error will be displayed in the tape. It is treated, as was said, by switching to standard tools ( built-in-actions ).

Why it is done: Facebook justifies the innovation by the fact that custom alerts in the activity tape are often poorly implemented, annoying, they are often marked as spam. As conceived by Facebook, standard tools will help make the content distribution system on a social network more qualitative.

You can enable the following changes before they take effect and check how the application behaves. This can be done in the Advanced section of the application settings :



And - the changes themselves:

Disable redirection to the login page.
Facebook will remove the Authenticated Referrals feature. Instead, the Login Dialog dialog will be used to authenticate users.

Create_event permission is now required to remove participants from events.
Read more about this on the Permissions page.

Minor change in admin.getAppProperties request.
Now, when you make the admin.getAppProperties request, we will return an empty Android Key Hash field [] instead of [“"].



Canonical URLs used in retrieving Open Graph objects.
Facebook starts using canonical URLs (for example, URLs labeled with the og: url tag, redirect 301/302, etc.) when selecting objects (for example, http://graph.facebook.com?ids=http://developers. facebook.com ).

When searching for messages, the offset parameter is now unavailable.
Instead, Facebook calls for using the since and until parameters. More information on the blog .

The braces in the syntax for mentioning users are now unavailable.
These {USER_ID} symbols are now irrelevant for mentioning a user in notifications. The correct syntax is @ [USER_ID].

Removed the ability to post on the walls of friends using the Graph API.
In particular, messages from [user_id] / feed will not be published if [user_id] is different from the user who is currently in the application, and stream.publish requests will also have no action (if target_id is different from the current user’s id). If you want to allow users to post messages on the walls of friends - call the dialog box:



Publications that contain links to your friends via references or tags will appear in their timeline only if friends approve tags). More information - in the blog .

Image request can return properties.
The ability to return the url, height, width and is_silhouette fields on request / picture is introduced (you can specify the callback property and the redirect parameter = false or get the "image" field as part of a large JSON request).

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March 6th , 2013

The following changes Facebook plans to introduce in early March:

Denying access to the Mailbox table in FQL without authorization of the user.
It will be denied access to messages, comments or the Mailbox table in FQL without user authorization.

Remove applications from the / me / accounts section.
Applications will not be displayed in the / me / accounts section of the Graph API. You can get to the list of applications developed by the user only by switching to / me / applications / developer /.

Deleting a redirect to documents when switching to graph.facebook.com.
Redirect to the Graph API docs will not be made.

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3rd April 2013

And such changes in the plan for April:

Remove the ability to perform POST in USER_ID / questions.
The user question creation function will be removed from the Graph API. POST for USER_ID / questions will not be executed.

Deleting properties and column «version».
Facebook will remove the “version” column from the “group” table in FQL, as well as from the “group” table in the Graph API.

The original can be read here: https://developers.facebook.com/roadmap/