Upcoming Changes to News Feed Process
January 21, 2008
Within the past week, Facebook announced a promising update to the News Feed. The change, which is specific to the feed.publishTemplatizedAction API method, will only allow stories to be published for actions actively taken by the actor mentioned in the story. Prior to this change, many applications publish feed stories to targeted users who are simply mentioned in stories, despite the fact that these users did not actually perform any action.
Based upon the tone of the announcement, Facebook seems to be getting more serious about controlling the quality of applications and how developers interact with the Platform.
In order to ensure a high quality experience for users, starting 9am Pacific time Tuesday 22 January we may contact you, or in severe cases initiate an enforcement action, if your stories are not complying with the new policy, especially if the volume of non-complying stories is high.
While this change is likely to upset the “blackhat” developers who use frowned upon marketing techniques, it will undoubtedly be appreciated by both the end users and the frustrated developers who continue to market using more accepted, ethical practices.
From a technical perspective, the change results in Facebook ignoring the actor_id parameter that was previously provided to the API call. Instead, the session_key used to generate the story will be used as the actor when publishing stories. Although Facebook will continue to support the old parameter for the next month, both the client and documentation have been updated for those interested in preparing for the change.
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[…] of the much greater learning curve in trying to understand the concepts of templatized actions, the various updates to this API call have created even more difficulties for both novice and experienced Platform […]