The past few weeks have been rather slow for Facebook’s Operation Developer Love updates. It almost seemed like the love was slowly fading away, but the social network came back in force last night with an update full of new features.
First up, Facebook app developers now have the ability to link their app page with the app details page in the App Center. Doing so will create a number of new buttons of your app page that will hopefully drive more traffic to your apps. The first button is a “Go to App” or “Play Game” button that will appear at the top of the page. The right side of the app page will also include a link that says “Visit App Page” for those who want to check out information or ratings on App Center first.
Before that, developers will have to make sure that their app is categorized as an “App Page” according to Facebook’s guidelines. The page must also contain the app name so as not to confuse any would be users. Both of these options can be changed in the “App Details” section of the App Dashboard.
To help further drive installs, Facebook has launched a new app promotion page to help developers learn how to properly promote apps across Facebook. The usual suspects are present such as mobile app install ads and sponsored results.
In other news, the subscribe button on app and brand pages has now been changed to say “follow.” Facebook says the change came about as follow “resonates better with people who use Facebook.”
Finally, the platform policies have been updated once again to address links to privacy policies. Facebook says that developers will not be able to use any data accessed by their apps outside of said app until the developer includes a “conspicuous link” to their privacy policy in the app. You can read more about this policy and others here.
As for the weekly bug report, 286 were reported and 30 were fixed. Eleven bugs were accepted for further review. Check out the entire bug fix list at the blog post.
