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

Have you also received notifications from Facebook apps recently? With the meaning of “we’ve changed something in the API here, so maybe the application will start to work incorrectly soon”.

The fact is that not so long ago, Facebook introduced a new Breaking Change Policy practice (if in Russian, then something like a “Policy of critical changes”). The social network notifies developers of upcoming "restructures" in the API, which, accordingly, requires changes to the code of existing applications. And which will need to be taken into account when developing new ones, naturally. Facebook encourages developers to subscribe to the  blog , so as not to miss anything important.

In the meantime, the most relevant changes that have already begun to be implemented or will be implemented very soon (tomorrow, the 6th February - the beginning of the first stage of the changes).

February 6, 2013

Facebook will no longer display custom user actions in the activity stream. Instead, the social network pumped up standard tools for sharing user actions - they will need to replace their individual achievements:



Facebook assures that most user actions will not affect the change, it will affect only those actions that are associated with the activity feed.

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

Why is this done:Facebook justifies the innovation by the fact that custom alerts in the activity stream are often poorly implemented, annoying, they are often marked as spam. As planned by Facebook, standard tools will help make the content distribution system on the social network better.

The following changes can be included before they take effect and check how the application will behave. You can do this in  the Advanced section of the application settings :



And - the changes themselves:

Disabling redirection to the authorization page.
Facebook will remove the Authenticated Referrals feature. Instead, the Login Dialog dialog will be used to authorize users.

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

A slight change in the 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 to get Open Graph objects.
Facebook starts using canonical URLs (for example, URLs tagged with og: url, 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 no longer available .
Instead, Facebook encourages the use of the since and until parameters. More info on the  blog .

Curly braces in the syntax for mentioning users are no longer available.
Such designations {USER_ID} are now irrelevant for mentioning the user in notifications. The correct syntax is @ [USER_ID].

Removed the ability to post friends on the walls 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 effect (if target_id is different from the id of the current user). If you want to allow users to post to friends' walls, call the dialog box:



Publications that contain links to your friends through mentions or tags will be displayed in their timeline only if friends approve the tags). More information on the blog .

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

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March 6th , 2013

Facebook plans to introduce the following changes in early March:

Deny access to the Mailbox table in FQL without user authorization.
Access to messages, comments or the Mailbox table in FQL will be denied without user authorization.

Removing applications from the / me / accounts section.
Applications will not be displayed in the / me / accounts section of the Graph API. You can get into the list of applications whose developers the user is only by going to / me / applications / developer /.

Removing a redirect to documents when switching to graph.facebook.com.
Redirecting to  Graph API docs will not be performed.

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April 3rd , 2013

And here are the changes in the plan for April:

Removing the ability to perform POST in USER_ID / questions.
The functionality for creating questions by users will be removed from the Graph API. The POST request for USER_ID / questions will not be executed.

Removing the property 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/