Developer Blog

Pricing in a User’s Preferred Currency

Friday at 12:20am

To help you improve monetization in your game, we are launching an API that gives you access to the user's preferred currency and the conversion rate to Credits. This lets you show prices in the user's preferred currency in your in-game stores.
For example, a user visits your store to buy an item priced at $10 (100 Credits). You can access the preferred currency — EUR for this user — and the current conversion rate from Credits to EUR via the API described below. Instead of displaying price in USD, you can now show the item price as €8.12 (100 credits * 0.0812 conversion rate). When you invoke the pay dialog, use the parameter "oscif=true", and the user will see €8.12 as the price of the item in the pay dialog as well.

Castleville's in-game store and payment dialog show items priced in EUR, this user's preferred currency.

To access this data, issue an HTTP GET to /USER_ID?fields=currency with a user access token for your app.

GET https://graph.facebook.com/USER_ID?fields=currency
        &access_token=USER_ACCESS_TOKEN

RESULT:
 {
   "currency": {
      "user_currency": "EUR", 
      "currency_exchange": 12.31857, 
      "currency_exchange_inverse": 0.0811782536, 
      "currency_offset": 100
   }, 
   "id": "596824621", 
   "type": "user"
 }

See our documentation for more details on how to implement this in your app.

Platform Updates: Operation Developer Love

Thursday, June 28, 2012 at 6:30am

Since last Wednesday's update, we announced the built-in follow action, shared guidance on how to grow mobile games and apps with Facebook, and announced plans to help you stay connected to other Facebook developers with Meetups.

Adding multiple photos and location to Open Graph actions

Photos and places are important for helping users tell rich stories. As such we've now added the ability to attach multiple photos to Open Graph actions and have added better location support. You can now associate your own location data with your Open Graph actions and objects. This means that you can create your own place objects or use a third party location service instead of Facebook place IDs. Stories that include a location will appear on a user’s Timeline map and will be included in their News Feed stories and aggregations.
To take advantage of this expanded location functionality, in your app's Open Graph settings, select "place" from the drop down menu when defining an object and specify the location property with the "GeoPoint" type. You must also select the "places" checkbox when you submit your action for approval. There may be scenarios where you want to rely on third-party location services like Foursquare to attach location data to your actions. We will now accept third party locations and treat them appropriately.
Check out our documentation to learn more about publishing multiple photos for an action and tagging locations in actions.

New summary count fields in event FQL table

We've added the following fields to the event FQL table to make it easier to get the counts of users RSVP-ed to an event:

• all_members_count
• attending_count
• unsure_count
• declined_count
• not_replied_count

For more informations, check out the event FQL table documentation.

New date for offline_access permission removal

We were originally planning to remove the offline_access permission next week but have moved that change back to October 3rd, 2012. The Developer Roadmap has been updated. Please see the Removal of offline_access permission doc for more information.

Next week's breaking changes

Several breaking changes will be going into effect next week on Thursday, July 5th. Normally, per our Breaking Change policy, we only introduce breaking changes on the first Wednesday of the month but July 4th is a U.S. holiday. Please review this list of changes to ensure your app is up to date and will continue working after we make these changes next week.

Changes without migrations

• Removing FB.Canvas.setAutoResize
• Event GETs from Graph API/FQL will require an access token

Changes in "July 2012 Breaking Changes" migration

• Removing display=wap dialogs
• Removing some event FQL object fields
• Coordinate-less tags
• Removing bookmark.add and profile.addtab dialogs
• Moving "type" property into "metadata" array

Changes in other migrations

• Removal of FBML
• Updating Page "hours" property
• Batch API exception format
• Removing timezone from event times

For the full details on all these changes, please check out the Developer Roadmap.

September migration now available

The "September 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 September 5th, 2012. Check out the Developer Roadmap for more information on what changes are included in the migration.

Check your privacy policy

It is critical that people have a clear understanding about how the information they share with apps is used. As outlined in our policies, every app on Facebook must provide the URL to their privacy policy in the Dev App.
Starting next week, we will send weekly warnings via email to the developers of apps that have do not have a live privacy policy URL listed in the Dev App. If you have not resolved the issue by the third warning, your app will be placed into sandbox mode and users will not be able to access it. To get your app out of sandbox mode, you will need to go into the Advanced Dialog tab of the Dev App and add the URL to your privacy policy.

Javascript SDK cleanup

We are continuing to reduce the number of methods exposed by the global FB object in the Javascript SDK and will now start to log a warning to the console whenever a non-documented method is used. At a later time, these will all be stubbed with empty functions before finally being removed entirely from the FB object. For the list of publicly available methods, please see the Javascript SDK documentation.

Weekly Stats

The following stats are for activity between Wednesday, June 20th and Wednesday, June 27th.

Bugs activity

• 183 bugs were reported
• 24 bugs were reproducible and accepted (after duplicates removed)
• 11 bugs were by design
• 6 bugs were fixed
• 43 bugs were duplicate, invalid, or need more information

Bugs fixed

• Documentation typo: "setting setting the overflow property" on http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/like
• FB.Canvas.setSize does nothing in IE7 Page Tabs
• App Center Page "cover image" will not update in preview
• Wordpress Plugin - Comments plugin width cannot be configured
• Error 500 occurs frequently during authorization when using facebook.com/device API
• Javascript API from Android/iPhone WebView does not work

Activity on facebook.stackoverflow.com

• 487 questions asked
• 356 questions with a score of 0 or greater
• 121 answered, 34% answered rate
• 215 replied, 60% reply rate

Enable Followers in Your App

Thursday, June 28, 2012 at 3:15am

Today we are launching the Open Graph built-in follow action. The follow action makes it easier for people to keep tabs on the stories people tell from within your app in their News Feed, Timeline and through the notifications channel.
For example, a person can follow their favorite restaurant critic from within a food review app on Facebook.
When a person follows another person, the follower will get an entry in their Recent Activity box:
The follower will also see a notification that they followed someone in your app:
Content a person publishes within your app will be displayed in the follower's News Feed even if they aren't Facebook friends. People can control who sees what they publish through the privacy settings of the app.
Starting today we will no longer approve custom follow actions. Apps that currently use a custom follow action must migrate to use the built-in follow in the next 90 days. We have updated the Platform Roadmap to reflect this change.
To learn more about using the follow action, please see our documentation on built-in follow.

Growing Mobile Games and Apps with Facebook

Tuesday, June 26, 2012 at 10:30pm

Many times I get asked by developers, "should I build for Facebook or mobile?", and the answer is, both. It's not a question of one or the other. Mobile apps, just like apps on Facebook.com, can benefit from an audience of more than 900 million users, 500 million of whom are active Facebook mobile users.
Regardless if an app lives on a mobile platform, like iOS or Android, or on Facebook.com, it can plug into Facebook and grow through News Feed, timeline, Requests, Bookmarks, Search, and now the App Center. Last month, Facebook drove people to iOS apps 134 million times, and to the Apple App Store 83 million times.
By enabling people to log into their apps with Facebook, mobile developers can reach a wider audience, and keep people coming back.

Go from solo to social

It all starts with Facebook for login, which is how mobile developers can turn one user into many.
Wooga's game, Diamond Dash is available on Facebook.com, and as an iPhone app. People can log into the iPhone app with their Facebook account, find their friends, and share back to Facebook.
Once a mobile app integrates with Facebook, people can log into the app in one click, without needing to remember a separate user name and password. Once the mobile app is connected to their Facebook account, users can find friends and share activity (such as scores and achievements) back to Facebook. Additionally, a bookmark will be added on the Facebook mobile app, so it's easy to re-engage.
For mobile developers, using Facebook for login improves conversion by providing an easy registration process, increases engagement by making it possible for people to connect with friends, and offers distribution through Facebook.
Examples of top iPhone apps integrated with Facebook include: Texas HoldEm Poker, Slotomania , Bejeweled Blitz, Diamond Dash, Words With Friends, Draw Something, Nike+ Running, Pinterest, Goodreads, Pose, Foodspotting, DoubleDown Casino, and Stitcher Radio.

Facebook complements a mobile strategy

SongPop
SongPop, a "Name That Tune"-style game by FreshPlanet, is available as a Facebook-connected app on Facebook.com, iPhone and Android, and 65% of mobile users login with Facebook (vs. email).
The SongPop iPhone app
SongPop on Facebook.com
The app has become one of the fastest growing social games, with 3.9 million monthly active Facebook users across web and mobile.
Songza
Another music app built with Facebook, Songza, recently became the #1 free music app on the iPhone and iPad. During this time, the number of Facebook-connected users grew from 7,000 daily actives to more than than 120,000.
Songza users are given the option to log into the iPhone and iPad apps with their Facebook account or email address, and more than double the percentage of users sign in with Facebook.
Not only do the majority of people log into Songza with Facebook, but those users share the experience with friends, driving viral growth to the app. In May, each active Facebook-connected user generated more than one referral visit.
Social growth and discovery: Songza can be found through Facebook in the App Center, bookmarks, timeline, and more.

The social games ecosystem is growing

More than 230 million people play games on Facebook.com every month. And, more than 130 games on Facebook have more than 1 million monthly active users each, from King.com (52.3M+ users), to Peak Games (18M+ users), Rovio (17.3M+ users), Playtika (7.2M+ users), Halfbrick (6M+ users), and Kixeye (4.7M+ users).
We'll continue to build tools that benefit mobile, web, and cross platform developers, to make it easier for people to find social apps, and share them with their friends, wherever they are.