Cristiano on Tech/Life

The new Facebook homepage that was released last week has messed up the opportunities for an app  to end up in a user’s (and subsequently the user friends’s) news feed. At Nudge we did a bit of research and discovered the new optimal way of distributing your application stories.

So what changed?

The mayor changes regarding Facebook feed stories can be easily summarized. Quoting from the Facebook developer Wiki:

• Full stories are no longer displayed on the home page or profile.
• You are no longer required to provide a title for short story templates
• One-line stories will only appear on the Profile in the “recent activity”  section. They will not appear in the stream.

In other words: full stories are a thing of the past, and any other stories won’t appear in the user’s normal stream. As a consequence of this, an app’s feed story won’t end up on the friends’ news feeds either. Also: flash in feed stories seems to be a definite thing of the past.

So what can we do about it?

It seems that the new preferred method for getting your app’s stories published is through the use of Feed Forms. Feed forms prompt the user before publishing a story using FBML or FBJS, instead of using an API call to publish the story on their behalf. The upside is that the Feed Forms will default to a short story, not a one-line format. Additionally, and probably the most important thing, is that the stories generated by a Feed Form will be full feed items, and therefore show up in the friend’s news feeds, giving your app the optimal reach possible.

How about some examples?

There are two ways of presenting the user with a Feed Form. The first one involves a form and some JSON.

Start off by making a form and adding a fbtype=”feedStory” to the FORM tag. Your code will look something like this:

When this form gets submitted, instead of redirecting the user to the action url, it will make an asynchronous call to the url (target_url in this case). The expected server response is of the following form:

After the user submits the form, and the response is returned, Facebook will present the user with a dialog much like this one:

As you can see, the user can select to always allow these stories from this app, resulting in a quite similar result as before the change. The user can also add their own comment to the news feed story. On the news feed this will look something like this.

And, the most important part is, this will also show up on the friends’ news feeds.

Can’t we do this easier?

There must be an easier way to do this right? Especially considering that this example before might break quite a few app flows. And yes there is a different way to do this, using FBJS. Imagine a user just submitted a form successfully and you’ve redirected them to some other page. The only thing need now to push a feed story is to insert this little bit of FBJS into that page’s output:

This will automatically present the user with a popup with the feed form, allowing them to push this to their feed.

Conclusion

Getting app stories into a user’s feed has become harder, but at the same time it has generated more transparency for the user. The new Feed Forms are easy to implement and probably easier to debug than the API calls from before. Sadly the full stories have been send to the graveyard and all its cool features like Flash integration have gone with it.

There’s much more to the Feed Forms than I just described here, so go and have a look at the Developer Wiki article to explore its other features.