In Facebook’s latest Operation Developer Love post on the company’s developer blog, Justin Moore writes, “Apps can post historical actions to help people fill out their timelines and/or queue up activity from an offline state. For example, a photo app can let people add photos from their past vacations to their timeline.”

“Any past activity that is posted will not appear in News Feed or ticker,” Moore points out. “Past activity will have the same privacy that the user chose for the app, and users can control and delete the activity from their Activity Log or directly from timeline.”

Developers must prompt users before publishing historical activity and providing explicit controls, Moore warns. That should make users happy.

“For example, Goodreads, a book recommendations website, created a settings page to let people select which activities to include on their timeline,” he says.

That looks like this:

Facebook recently started approving actions that apps can implement within the Open Graph.

Basically, it lets you create a video similar to the one Facebook put out when it first introduced the timeline feature:

Go to TimelineMovieMaker.com, and you’ll be prompted to “make your movie”. When you click the button to do so, you’ll connect to Facebook, and it will make your movie, grabbing random photos, videos and other content from your timeline. You can then change the soundtrack, choosing from options like “cinematic,” “romantic,” “nostalgic,” “playful,” etc. You can also change any of the content that was used. Once you have it the way you want it, you can share it with your friends.

Not a bad way to market the feature, though the sharing part could be improved. When you post it to your wall, there is no real indication that what your sharing is a movie of your timeline. It just looks like you’re sharing a link to the movie maker itself, but once it’s clicked, its starts building your movie again for the viewer.

We’ve actually seen similar apps to the movie maker in the past, but not from Facebook itself. For example, well before the Timeline feature was even announced, there was Museum of Me from Intel:

And of course there was the much more fun and terrifying Take This Lollipop:

In fact, that’s almost the anti-TimelineMovie maker. This would be a good time for a refresh of that, and really freak out the anti-timeline crowd. Facebook would love that, I’m sure.

Send money to friends and family with PayPal, and include a customized greeting card for that personal touch. With hundreds of cards to choose from, we have the perfect card for any occasion.

PayPal Send Money is the fast, secure, and social way to send money for gifts, special events, or any occasion. The Send Money Facebook app provides the same level of security trusted by millions of PayPal users.

Users are presented with the option to either send a card with money, or just send money. It requires you to give permission to see your friends list. You can send money to a Facebook friend or anyone with an email address.

Note that while the app will post the card to the person’s wall, it will only display the money to you and the recipient. On the wall, it will look something like this:

You can personalize it by including pictures, YouTube videos, or videos recorded with your webcam.

Then, just add the amount you want to give them. You can even control the currency right from the app.

Hat tip to Mashable for first reporting on the app.

In other PayPal news, the company is warning people that they need to upgrade their browsers if they’re using old ones. They’re displaying messages to this effect on PayPal.com. PayPal Chief Information Security Officer Michael Barrett writes on the PayPal Blog:

The reason is simple. Browser vendors make significant investments in security functionality from one version of a browser to the next. As security bugs are found in browsers – and this happens on a surprisingly regular basis – vendors will only issue fixes for those bugs in the supported versions of their browsers. This means that it’s important to keep your browser up-to-date, so you can take advantage of the improved security in the newest version.

However, a small percentage of Internet users aren’t aware of the risks posed by older browsers and continue to use the more unstable versions, which is why we’ve implemented a system of “gentle reminders” on paypal.com. These reminders don’t force anyone to upgrade, but they are persistent enough that we hope people notice them and take action accordingly. At PayPal, we believe security is of the utmost importance.

“[We're] going to make it so you can connect to anything you want in any way you want,” he says.

Basically you don’t have to “like” everything. You can just read a book, watch a movie, eat a meal, etc. That’s the way he describes it.

You’ll start seeing things like:

Mark “reviewed” a restaurant.

“Last year we added the nouns, this year we added the verbs,” he says.

This stuff goes into ticker and timeline, but not the news feed, as to make it less annoying.

The new class of apps will focus on helping users fill out their timeline and helping users discover new things through their friends. The three ways they’ll do this, he says, will be frictionless experiences, realtime serendipity and finding patterns in friends’ activity.

Apps will be designed around things like music, movies, TV, News, Books, etc. but also around things like Exercise, Fashion, Emotions, and other lifestyle categories.

All of Facebook’s new music whisperings we’ve been hearing about are based on this. Various music services are simply taking advantage (like Spotify, Slacker Radio and others). You can listen to songs at the same time your friend is, with the track synced up.

There is a music timeline view on people’s timelines where you can see your friends’ musical tastes.

The mentality has become apparent most recently based on the company’s actions of shutting down a number of applications using Facebook Platform, without notification. Facebook’s “ban bot” recently received a tweak, and has been more aggressively banning applications it deems to be spammy (hat tip to AllFacebook for bringing this to light).

Has Facebook been too aggressive with app elimination? Comment here.

Related Article: Profile Maker Developer Discusses Facebook Ban Issue

The whole thing reminds me of Google’s Panda update – designed to weed out low quality content, which it did to some extent, but only while taking down legitimate content with it. However it appears Facebook is a little more open to human intervention than Google, as some apps are being reinstated, while Google has not done any manual adjustments to help individual sites that may have been wrongfully impacted (though various algorithmic tweaks have helped some sites to some extent).

The whole thing comes at a very interesting crossroads for the Internet, where businesses are looking more to social media to become less reliant on the algorithmic whims of search engines. This shows that the road to social media visibility is not necessarily paved with roses either.

To the press, Facebook has been giving out the same generic statement, without giving any numbers on how many apps have been affected:

“Over the past year, we’ve worked hard to improve our automated systems that catch spam and malicious behavior on the platform. These systems allowed us to cut spam on the platform by 95 percent in 2010, greatly increasing user satisfaction and trust with apps on Facebook. Recently, we started getting a lot of user feedback, spiking significantly over the past week, on the amount of application spam people are seeing in their feeds and on their walls. As a result, we turned on a new enforcement system [last week] that took user feedback much more heavily into account. This resulted in a number of applications with high negative user feedback being disabled or having certain features disabled. We’ve posted a link for developers where they can appeal if they feel they’ve been disabled in error. Also, we’re working on new analytics to help developers better monitor negative user feedback to prevent a spike like this in the future.”

Naturally, fury has erupted on the Facebook Developer Forum. Much of this has been led by a user going by the handle “whitekuti,” though many members of the forum have expressed similar notions and agreed heavily with whitekuti’s rants.

Whitekuti’s apps included two photo effect apps and a “social photo interview” app, each with respectable numbers of users and ratings. 7.5 million users, 300,000 users, and 200,000 users respectively, and ratings of 4.7 out of 5, 4.9 out of 5, and 4.6 out of 5.

Facebook is offering developers a means to appeal, via a form that looks like this:

However, the appeals process has been heavily criticized as well. Whitekuti says they got the following automatic response from Facebook, after having its appeal denied:

Thanks for your inquiry. To help keep Platform policies simple while delivering great Platform experiences to users, our automated systems remove apps providing poor user experiences. Our systems use a variety of signals to assess user experience, such as user feedback on an app’s communications (Stream stories, etc.) and on the app itself.

The Platform Integrity and Developer Support Team
Facebook

Whitekuti also said Facebook had even killed a “try out” app, which hadn’t even been released yet, as it was in sandbox mode.

Loss of Money

Some of these app developers are losing money, and their companies are being severely harmed by the banning of their apps. A user going by the handle leoxtc writes: “My app disappeared  yesterday after 6 months of perfectly normal operation…we did not receive any complaint nor thru FB nor via its user feedback channel. The app…is a social game based on the on line investments industry.”

”We don’t do spam and as far as we understand we are 100% in line with the TOS,” added leoxtc. “We have been working hard with this app for the last 12 months. It is a local success. People talk about the game. We don´t understand what we did wrong. We spent thousands of dollars for the application development. Its not fair being banned without an single warning.”

And speaking of a lack of communication, before a Facebook engineer finally chimed in on the conversation, the company’s response strategy was even criticized by one of the forum’s moderators (dburns), who said: “Guys, the moderators are volunteers, and we have no power over any of Facebook’s software (like the ban-bot) or their policies.  We just delete spam on the forums, mostly.  We do have a way of raising issues to the FB employees, and we have done so — over and over!  Trouble is, they’ve been ignoring us (and everyone on the forums too) for weeks or months. Filing a bug is the only way I know of to get official attention.  Although they’re not exactly quick at fixing bugs either…”

The Facebook engineer, Eugene, claimed to be working on the issue. He essentially echoed the other Facebook statement, while being a little more apologetic:

We’ve been getting a lot of user feedback recently, spiking significantly over the past week, on the amount of application spam people are seeing in their feeds and on their walls. We turned on a new enforcement system yesterday that took user feedback much more heavily into account. This resulted in a number of applications with high negative user feedback being disabled or having certain features disabled. In particular, many applications were disabled which posted to the walls of other users and had very high mark-as-spam numbers.

-Eugene

We’ve seen the criticism of the appeals process, and that doesn’t do much for those getting ignored, or the employees of the businesses that depend on these apps.

User pvar wrote, “We’ve actually invested over hundreds of thousands of dollars on Facebook ads alone for one of our games, and one instance of it got disabled the other day (though it did get re-enabled, probably as a result of this thread and other developer feedback). This game was also operating fine with no issues for over a year (also average reviews of over 4 stars)….until it was killed without any warning, like many of your apps.”

“This wouldn’t be the first time events like this have happened to us, but this time it was a serious threat onto our business,” added pvar. “We work with over 20 employees (that is REAL people, REAL lives), and their livelihoods are greatly affected by events such as this one. At this point, we are not even sure if we are comfortable continuing running our business on the Facebook platform.”

“We are currently very close to get funded for creating several other Facebook applications that has great value for users,” said user Shmzlr. “This obviously changes everything – first the investors will think twice before going further with the deal, but more importantly – we ourselves can’t take part in an ecosystem that has so much uncertainty and high risk for getting banned while not doing anything wrong. This is not the first time we had bad experiences with the automated system, but this is far too much. If our application won’t get re-instated soon I can safely say that we are leaving this ecosystem for good without any hesitations.”

The Users

Of course the app users are upset as well.

“Think about my situation here,” user aladaf said in response to the Facebook engineer. “We are a small company based in Sao Paulo. During 6 months we have received no feedback from anyone in FB. 4.6 rating. No complaints. Positive PR. Our app was becoming one of the local most visible cases. All of sudden I am having to explain to 46k users why we are out of business! This cannot be the best strategy to deal with the issue you has just described. I believe everybody here will be more than open to adjust things but the appeal process is not being effective  in providing the necessary information.   I launched a new version today just to see it disabled after 10 minutes. What exactly I did wrong? ”

Whitektui said that a huge number app users “begged” them to return their deleted photos, “saying how they loved the hptos they have created over the year with their children.” Whitekuti also posted the following image and user comments:

“Please give me my album back. The pictures are very dear to me, they are mostly of my only son who passed away in october 2010.”

” WTH??? Why is everyone loosing their photos?? We obviously liked this application & all of our photos get deleted??? NOT COOL!!! I had my kids , grandbabies, my daughters picture in her cap & gown!!!! VERY DISSAPIONTED & SLIGHTLY UPSET!!! FACEBOOK YOU NEED TO FIX THIS ASAP OR GET RID OF THE APP IF IT’S GOING TO MESS UP ALL OF OUR PHOTO ALBUMS~~ signed a very upset & deacated Facebook fan!!!!!!!!”

Reinstating the Apps

As mentioned, Facebook isn’t above reinstating apps that it deems legitimate. GoodReads is an app that has been named as one that got banned and reinstated. One member, mosh951 writes: “Facebook has re-enabled most of our 30 apps, but still a couple of them along with my account are still disabled.”

The whole communication thing appears to be the biggest problem, along with that whole shoot first ask questions later mentality. User Kauffman writes: “Why didn’t the new ban system get implemented AFTER you gave developers all the tools they require to understand why such a thing happened? For example, AFTER you launched the new insights system? Developers are a tiny subset of the entire Facebook population – that’s why you don’t give a Shit. And that is the truth. If people’s photos started getting deleted without any warning, the PR team would be on overdrive on all media outlets. Us – we get some engineer spouting off lame apologies when the damage has already been done. ‘A couple of weeks’ is no assurance -  if you guys are going to flag apps automatically, you better have a review system that responds immediately. You’re talking about people’s businesses and lives on the line here.”

Even Whitekuti has had some apps reinstated, but is still talking about leaving the Facebook Platform. He’s not the only one I’ve seen make such a statement. “We simply lost faith to its System,” whitekuti said. “We might not be the biggest developer on Facebook , with total of 15 million users , but this is enough to prove to us that Facebook is no longer the place we could trust.”

whitekuti even says of the forum itself: “Just FYI, THIS FORUM IS BARELY AN ACTIVE FORUM, so many developers do not even know where to report this ridiculous mass banning. We are sure there are hundreds more like us out there.”

User wwav10 writes: “We appreciate facebook re-enabled our Grand Poker application last week.  But we did suffer a huge loss in DAU and revenue.”

A Matter of Being the Little Guy?

Is the ban bot playing fair?

Some of the developers appear to be under the impression that how big you are makes a big difference. Pvar said in the forum, “Also, as a side note, from what I recall (and from what I heard), Zynga’s Empires & Allies app was also disabled for a few hours after it first launched. Of course that one got re-enabled pretty quickly. Ultimately, Facebook probably won’t care about smaller developers (aside from Zynga, etc)….so this post was probably just a waste of my time.”

Zynga, the creators of hugely popular apps Cityville, Farmville, and Mafia Wars have no doubt seen their share of blocks from users. These games are some of the most often complained about apps on Facebook, simply in terms of non players being annoyed by the activity of their friends who are players, though to Facebook’s credit, the company did launch new features in September related to controlling game updates so that only those actually playing the game would see the updates.

“This means people who play games can post stories to their Wall without worrying about overwhelming their friends who aren’t playing, and people who don’t play games won’t see irrelevant stories in their feed for which they have no context,” saidFacebook Games Product Manager Jared Morgenstern.

Josh Constine at Inside Facebook, which tracks Facebook Platform for developers, looks at the Game of Truth app, one that was impacted, and deemed a small to mid-sized app at 10 to 20K daily active users. He provided the following graph:

He suggests Facebook release some kind of benchmark for an acceptable level of negative feedback. We’ll see if something like that come with that new set of metrics that’s supposedly coming in the next couple of weeks.

Update 06/30: A Facebook representative finally returned our request for comment, but avoided specific questions and only said :

We don’t comment on specific cases but we have an appeals process if developers feel they’ve been disabled in error. Additionally, we’re working on updated tools and analytics to help developers better monitor user feedback and provide more transparency into our systems. As part of this, 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. However, for apps that do violate our policies (https://developers.facebook.com/policy/), we will continue to take action in order to maintain a trustworthy experience for users.

Do you think Facebook has been fair to app developers? Tell us what you think.

“Symantec has discovered that in certain cases, Facebook IFRAME applications inadvertently leaked access tokens to third parties like advertisers or analytic platforms,” says Symantec’s Nishant Doshi. “We estimate that as of April 2011, close to 100,000 applications were enabling this leakage. We estimate that over the years, hundreds of thousands of applications may have inadvertently leaked millions of access tokens to third parties.”

“Access tokens are like ‘spare keys’ granted by you to the Facebook application,” Doshi explains. “Applications can use these tokens or keys to perform certain actions on behalf of the user or to access the user’s profile. Each token or ‘spare key’ is associated with a select set of permissions, like reading your wall, accessing your friend’s profile, posting to your wall, etc.”

According to the security firm, while Facebook currently uses OAuth 2.0 for authentication by default, older schemes that are still supported and used by “hundreds of thousands” of apps are where the problem begins.

“There is no good way to estimate how many access tokens have already been leaked since the release Facebook applications back in 2007,” says Doshi. “We fear a lot of these tokens might still be available in log files of third-party servers or still being actively used by advertisers. Concerned Facebook users can change their Facebook passwords to invalidate leaked access tokens. Changing the password invalidates these tokens and is equivalent to “changing the lock” on your Facebook profile.”

Yesterday, Facebook issued an update to its Developer Roadmap, outlining plans requiring all sites and apps to migrate to OAuth 2.0. All apps must migrate to the format by September 1.

Facebook and privacy concerns are certainly not strangers. Time and time again, something happens that brings concerns back into the spotlight. Last month, Facebook announced a new suite of safety tools and advanced security features.

"We created Rounds to give online social networking and social gaming more of a real-time, fun, and collaborative feeling," CEO Dany Fishel told WebProNews. "Rounds bridges the gap between real life and the online world by helping people feel close to one another no matter how far apart they are geographically."

Since launch, the app has been gaining momentum with over 300,000 active members. The company now has 20 games and activities for the app, including something called Random Rounds, introduced today.

If you’re thinking random video chat has been done before, you’d be right, but Rounds insists this will not encounter the infamous pitfalls of ChatRoulette (you know, the perverted stuff which got the service more attention than anything). 

"The Random Rounds feature is basically another interesting way for our users to enjoy our rich video chat platform," Fishel tells us. "The difference is, before, they could have either done stuff by themselves or with one of their Facebook friends, now, they can do them while meeting someone completely new."

"Unlike other random chat platforms that usually just offer video chatting and result in quick meaningless encounters (which don’t go beyond a few seconds), on Rounds, when you meet someone interesting, you can immediately break the ice with one of the effects, or use the social tips mechanism to get questions and ice breakers based on that persons interests and likes, and then bridge the physical gap with the different social activities and fun real-time games," Fishel says.

In fact, this sounds like a concept that could’ve made ChatRoulette more engaging from the beginning. Members can play with webcam effects, collaboratively watch YouTube videos, play multi-user interactive games, draw on whiteboards, send gifts to one another, write texts together, and browse websites such as Facebook, Google Maps and Flickr, while remaining in the video chat environment. 

"We’re not trying to replicate or even enhance the experience of sites like Chatroulette, we’re just creating a new way for our platforms users to do all the different activities that our platform has to offer whilst meeting someone new," says Fishel.   

"There are mechanisms in place to prevent questionable content from strangers," Fishel says. For example, only members with over 100 friends can use Random Rounds, and members are only connected to users within the same age group. Perhaps most importantly, members’ real Facebook account information is shown so there is no anonymity, and there is a reporting mechanism for singling out "bad" users. Users who abuse the platform will be blocked permanently and will be reported to Facebook at the risk of losing their account.

I should note that Rounds isn’t the only option for random video chat on Facebook. 

"As companies building on Platform grow, they develop the need to give people different levels of access, depending on individuals’ roles," says Facebook engineer Harshdeep Singh.

Apps now have roles for: administrator, developer, tester, and insights user. An administrator of course has complete access to everything. A developer can modify technical settings and access Insights, but they can’t reset secret keys, delete apps, or add users. Testers can simply test the app in sandbox mode, but can’t modify it. Insights users can access insights, but can’t modify the app. 

To start, all users listed as developers will become administrators, and Facebook is encouraging them to update their settings. 

They’ve also added more ways to monitor and control application changes. "To help businesses track changes, administrators can now specify an email address to receive notifications when their application’s settings are modified," says Singh. "We’ve also introduced an advanced security feature, which lets administrators require that changes are made from specific IP addresses."

As more and more businesses rely on Facebook applications (a number that is bound to increase significantly as Facebook Credits continue to pick up steam), it’s going to be increasingly important that businesses have all the control possible for their applications, so these changes would appear to be much needed.

If you’re unfamiliar with vChatter, it’s a popular Facebook video chat application with a focus on family-friendly video chat (in other words, they’re aiming to avoid the Chatroulette curse, which it should be able to do naturally being a Facebook app). vChatter did launch a standalone site in December, however. vChatter is also powering Bebo’s bChat service.

To date, over 130 million calls have been established with vChatter (since its founding last May), the spokesperson tells us. It has about 4 million registered users.

The new funding comes from a prominent group of angel investors led by Dave Kennedy.

"We have been approached by several VC firms, but decided to raise only what we needed from angels, minimize the dilution, and scale the business before taking institutional money," says CEO Will Bunker.

"As Will’s partner on the first successful online dating service that would become Match.com, I know first-hand Will’s ability to pioneer a new category and build a successful web business. vChatter has the potential to become as popular and influential as Match," adds Kennedy.

For what it’s worth, the average time on site for vChatter is 5 minutes 40 seconds.

Original Article: Over the weekend, Facebook updated its developer blog with a post subtly titled: "Platform Updates: New User Object fields, Edge.remove Event and more." Perhaps a more fitting title would have been, "We’re Giving Developers Access to User Mobile Phone Numbers and Home Addresses."

Why would that be a more fitting title? Because that’s the first update explained in the post, and most likely the one people will be most interested in (and not just developers). 

"We are now making a user’s address and mobile phone number accessible as part of the User Graph object," wrote Facebook’s Jeff Bowen. "Because this is sensitive information, we have created the new user_address and user_mobile phone permissions. These permissions must be explicitly granted to your application by the user via our standard permissions dialogs."

You know, that standard request for permission that looks something like this (which you read thoroughly every time right?):

"Please note that these permissions only provide access to a user’s address and mobile phone number, not their friend’s addresses or mobile phone numbers," says Bowen. 

So, now any site or app that uses Facebook integration (there are a few of them out there) can get direct access to your phone number and home address if you provide that info to Facebook. 

While there will no doubt be plenty of privacy-related outcries over this, it’s up to you if you want to provide that information. Just know that if you do, it’s available to third parties everywhere, so don’t be surprised if you log into sites with your Facebook account, and start getting marketing calls and mail that you didn’t get before.