Facebook recently started putting sponsored stories in the news feed, which it is labeling as “featured”. Today, the company is talking about how to create these using action specs and recent changes to its Ads API designed to make it easier for developers to adapt new story types as they’re launched.

Facebook will be getting rid of the old sponsored story creative types on May 1.

“Prior to this change Sponsored Stories were defined by choosing the correct Ad Creative type for the specific Sponsored Story type,” explains Jonathan Dean in a post on the Facebook Developer Blog. “E.g. a page like sponsored story was type 9, a page post like sponsored story was type 17 etc. This made it complicated for developers to incorporate new Sponsored Story types as each Sponsored Story required different fields per story type.”

“By defining Sponsored Stories via Action Specs we are making it easier for new Sponsored Story types to be integrated into Ad Tool apps as they will all make use of the same standard fields,” he says.

In the post, he runs through a couple of examples of the differences, but he also shares the following table illustrating each action spec for its corresponding legacy creative type.

Facebook sponsored stories, or “Featured Stories” if you will, are becoming harder for brands to ignore as it gets harder for messages to gain visibility in the Facebook News Feed organically. More on that here.