Facebook Details Timeline Aggregation Best Practices

Facebook in its continuous march to keep developers updated on all the changes coming to the platform has posted another Operation Developer Love. There’s nothing huge this week, but it’s ...
Facebook Details Timeline Aggregation Best Practices
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  • Facebook in its continuous march to keep developers updated on all the changes coming to the platform has posted another Operation Developer Love. There’s nothing huge this week, but it’s still important for developers who want to keep their apps healthy.

    While the big news from yesterday were action links for Timeline apps, Facebook also published a guide on how to best create Timeline aggregations. A Timeline aggregation is where an app takes all the data posted on a user’s Timeline and arranges it into a report. Facebook uses the example of a user posting a book they recently read on Goodreads. That story is later added to a Goodreads aggregation that details all the books a user has read in the past month.

    Facebook added an IP address whitelist a while back to help protect the security of apps and its users. It helps prevent unauthorized changes to an app by making it so that only those using the a whitelisted IP address can have access to the app. To help Facebook scrape these apps for Open Graph and Social Plugin reasons, the company has provided developers a list of Facebook IP addresses that developers should add to their whitelist.

    Announced a while back, Facebook was going to detail breaking changes only on the first Wednesday of each month. To help developers test their apps in the new breaking change environment, Facebook has implemented the Migrations framework. Developers can access this by going to Dev App, clicking on settings, then hitting up the Migrations section under the Advanced tab.

    Speaking of breaking changes, Facebook has announced the breaking changes for August. The first change is that Facebook will be deleting the FB.Canvas.setAutoResize. It will stop working on July 15, but it will be completely deleted starting August 1. The new call is FB.Canvas.setAutoGrow. On a smaller note, all calls to GET Page posts from the Graph API or FQL will require an access token.

    The next two breaking changes can be enabled or disabled until August 1. At that time, they will be unavailable for everyone. The first is that Facebook will be removing prompt_permissions.php and prompt_feed.php. If you’re still using these old tools, Facebook suggests you upgrade to the new Feed Dialog or OAuth Dialog.

    They will also be removing the Add to Timeline plugin. If you have it embedded into your app, Facebook will automatically change it to a Login Button with the recently consolidated publish_actions permission.

    As for the weekly bug report, Facebook saw 125 bugs reported with 26 of them being fixed. Check out the full post to see the entire bug report and fix list.

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