Facebook Redesigns The Developer Dashboard

Today, Facebook announced “major updates” to the Developer App, which it says will help developers “easily access, edit, and manage” apps on the Developer site. The dashboard (...
Facebook Redesigns The Developer Dashboard
Written by Chris Crum
  • Today, Facebook announced “major updates” to the Developer App, which it says will help developers “easily access, edit, and manage” apps on the Developer site.

    The dashboard (pictured above) has been redesigned, with access to your most frequently viewed apps from the left-hand menu, as well as the option to see all apps in a summary view or search for apps from the dashboard.

    “We have also made it easy for you to see important app information at a glance,” says Facebook software engineer Alan McConnell. “On the dashboard, you’ll see a summary of frequently needed app info including the app ID, app secret, and URLs. You can also quickly grant a user access token for your app, view Roles and see Insights.”

    “We have reorganized the sections within the Developer App to reduce redundant fields,” he adds. “Tooltips and field descriptions have also been added to help you better understand the requested information.”

    You can also add admins, developers, testers, and insights users from the Roles interface by clicking the “Add” link. You can also use auto-complete to add friends and non-friends via email or Facebook UID. Autocomplete also works in the search box.

    “We built the new Developer App to be cleaner and faster, with quicker load time, so you can edit and save changes to apps at an improved speed,” says McConnell. “The app now runs on the same high-performance architecture that powers Facebook and has a streamlined workflow, eliminating inefficient operations and data fetches.”

    Facebook is rolling this stuff out with a limited set of developers today, then will make it available to all over the coming weeks.

    Naturally, it didn’t take long for someone to mention the ban bot fiasco in the comments of Facebook’s announcement. Francis Pelland wrote: “Will this help with the ‘ban bot’ going insane as of late? Not to mention the lack of data behind why it decides to ban apps randomly?”

    If you’re unfamiliar with the recent ban bot ordeal, we discussed it at length here. Basically, Facebook banned a bunch of apps trying to clean up app spam, but took some legitimate apps out as well. We likened it to Facebook’s version of the Panda update. The developer of the popular app Profile Maker, which was one of the victims, shared his personal story about it with us here.

    Facebook’s program manager for developer relations responded to Pelland’s comment by saying: “As mentioned on Friday’s post, the team is working to make changes to the process, improve the developer experience related to spam enforcement, and provide more data on negative user feedback via new App Insights. Please stay tuned.”

    At the time of this writing, that response didn’t get any “likes”. The company has not returned my own request for further details on the matter.

    Facebook has said that it will release new insights around blocking in the next couple weeks.

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