Yahoo! Brings ‘Frictionless Sharing’ to 26 More Sites

Yahoo! announced an extension to the Facebook integration it introduced in September to 26 additional sites worldwide, including Yahoo TV, Yahoo Movies and Yahoo Games.

Yahoo News has taken advantage of Facebook’s new “frictionless sharing” method that allows apps to automatically publish stories about a user’s activity to the home page Ticker and Timeline. Yahoo claims referrals from Facebook to Yahoo News have increased by 300% in three months and that the site is seeing more traffic from the 18-34 audience as a result. Adding social reading features to the company’s other online properties is likely to continue to increase traffic, but Yahoo, like others integrating Facebook Open Graph, will need to continue to make it clear to users how their activity is being shared and how they can hide certain actions.

Since launching the Yahoo News friends’ activity feature, Yahoo says more than 12 million people have opted in for the service. When users connect their Facebook accounts with the Yahoo app, any stories people read on Yahoo News will be shared with friends via the Ticker, conglomerate News Feed stories and in a box on users’ Timelines.

Some users are hesitant to have everything they read displayed to their friends. It can be frustrating then to click on a Yahoo News link that brings up a permissions dialog rather than the story. There does not seem to be a way to opt out of connecting with the app and still go on to read the article. However, once users add the app, Yahoo does a nice job of informing people how their activity is being shared and giving them an easy way to browse privately.

We have previously compared how privacy and frictionless sharing is handled by social reader apps from The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, The Daily and The Independent. Yahoo, however, is the most popular with 20 million monthly active users, according to AppData, our data tracking service covering growth for apps on Facebook. The Washington Post Social Reader is the next most used with 4.7 million MAU.

View the original article here

Facebook Platform Updates: Frictionless Requests 2.0, OAuth 2.0 and HTTPS Deadlines Tomorrow, FMBL Ending June 2012

Yesterday, Facebook announced updates to the Requests 2.0 including the introduction of frictionless requests that don’t require users to complete a Requests dialog. This could get users to send more Requests, helping apps gain new users and reengage existing users. However, some users might opt in to frictionless requests without fully understanding the feature’s implications, and later be surprised to find out their in-app actions have been sending Requests to their friends

It also set the deprecation schedule for FBML. Support will be discontinued on January 1st, 2012, and apps using FBML will cease to work on June 1st, 2012. Last week’s Platform Update also noted additions to the Graph API, a change to setAutoResize, and a new way for developers to have their apps indexed. Finally, tomorrow is the migration deadline for OAuth 2.0 and HTTPS.

Previously, developers had to force users through a Requests dialog every time they want to send a Request. Developers can now enable frictionless requests, which allows them to automatically send Requests on behalf of its users when a user opts to send a Request to a friend they’ve already sent one to.

If enabled, when users go to send their first request to a specific friend, they’ll see a checkbox for “Don’t ask again before sending Requests to [this friend] from this app.” Next time they opt to send a Request to that same friend from that same app, the Request will be automatically sent without interrupting usage of the app.

As Requests are an important driver of growth and retention for apps, making it easier for users to send Requests should help apps increase their user counts. Frictionless Requests may also be compatible with Facebook’s forthcoming HTML5 mobile app platform, which will allow users to send Requests that are delivered as notifications.

Facebook is also implementing a new breaking change to Requests 2.0 that will improve its performance. A new migration setting called “Requests 2.0 Efficient” is now available in the Developer app. When activated this “changes the format for request IDs in the JavaScript requests callback method.” Developers should make the change to their JavaScript and then enable the migration.

In 90 days on January 1st, 2012, all apps will be opted into both Requests 2.0 Efficient and Upgrade to Requests 2.0. Developers should make sure they’re ready to prevent breakage. New apps are now opted into both these migrations and cannot opt out. Apps are also now responsible for deleting old Requests. Details for making the migration are available in the Requests documentation.

Facebook announced over a year ago its plans to deprecate FBML. In March 2011, it ceased to allow new FBML apps to be created. Now it has scheduled the final two steps of the deprecation.

On January 1st, 2012 Facebook will stop supporting FBML and cease to fix bugs except for those related to privacy and security. On June 1st, 2012, Facebook will remove all FBML endpoints and any apps built on the language will stop functioning. The deprecation will make Facebook app development more accessible as programmers won’t have to use a proprietary language.

The two main parts of FBML that remain useful to developers are Requests and Static FBML. Requests can now be handled with Requests 2.0, and Static FBML can be replaced with iframe apps. Several Facebook Preferred Developer Consultants offer free iframe app builders, including Wildfire Interactive. Facebook has also worked with Wildfire to offer a FBML to iframe migration tutorial. XFBML will not be deprecated.

As detailed in a Platform Update, problems with FB.Canvas.setAutoResize have forced Facebook to rename the call for controlling how an app is displayed on the Canvas page. The function is now named FB.Canvas.setAutoGrow and only works for increasing the size of an app. To shrink an app, Facebook recommends using “FB.Canvas.setSize with a height parameter to set the iframe height explicitly.” FB.Canvas.setAutoResize will be deprecated on January 1st, 2012.

Mutual friends between two users can now be retrieved from the Graph API with the call: https://graph.facebook.com/me/mutualfriends/FRIEND_ID

The following information about an application can now be pulled from the Graph API:

canvas_namelogo_urlicon_urlcompanydaily_active_usersweekly_active_usersmonthly_active_users

To do so, developers can use the call https://graph.facebook.com/ANY_APP_ID

To simplify how apps are indexed by Facebook’s internal search engine, now when apps reach 10 month active users they are queued to be indexed in the next index rebuild which happens ever two to four weeks. Developers no long need use the setting page’s Submit to Search link. This will make sure apps that are gaining users aren’t accidentally left out of search.

In May, Facebook announced that developers would eventually need to migrate to a more secure way to pass access tokens and allow users to browse their apps over a secure HTTPS connection. This followed a security issue where apps were found to be leaking permissions tokens that could give third-parties unauthorized access to user data. The migration becomes mandatory tomorrow, October 1st, 2011.

Developers must use OAuth 2.0 for authentication, encrypt access tokens, and have an SSL certificate and provide a secure browsing URL. To assist developers, Facebook has released admin.setAppProperties which allows the necessary settings changes to be made programmatically. FBML apps must also have SSL certificates and secure browsing URLs.

View the original article here

Zynga Experimenting With New “Frictionless” Game Requests on Facebook

As part of a series of updates to the games platform, Facebook has been restoring some of the virality it previously removed from social games in the news feed and on friends’ walls. Here’s an early example of a “frictionless” games requests viral tool implemented in Zynga’s Pioneer Trail:

The idea is that a player selecting “Quick Post” can bypass the Facebook dialogue box (pictured above) that triggers after clicking “Ask Friends.” This would add value to the user experience because it wouldn’t take the player out of the game to click on the dialogue box for each “Ask Friends” action (of which there are a lot in most social games). This feature also adds virality to the game from the developer side as the Wall posts will appear on any friend the player has selected to send the request to.

As this feature is clearly in its early testing phases, we cannot follow the flow of these posts all the way to the point where it winds up on a friend’s Wall. It is also not clear if Facebook would require developers to limit these “frictionless requests” (for lack of an official term) to only those Facebook friends already playing the game. The idea of a player posting games stories to non-gaming Facebook friends’ Walls seems like it would contradict all of the anti-spam measures Facebook took in the last year to limit the appearance of games stories to non-gaming users.

We’ll be keeping an eye on this feature as it develops. We expect to see Zynga reaching full implementation of frictionless requests before some other games begin to experiment with it as Zynga has a much larger workforce to devote toward testing new features. It’s also possible that certain developers are getting first dibs on testing the new feature, limiting the number of places we might see it in the coming weeks.

View the original article here