From Facebook Developer Wiki

On March 4, 2009, we released a preview of our new home page and announced some upcoming changes to Feed and Feed forms that will transform the ways users share and consume information through Facebook. These enhancements should give you much more effective and consistent distribution for your application or website from the content and actions users actively share from your experience.

You can read a deeper philosophical explanation on social streams and the new directions we're taking with Facebook Pages. This article gives you an overview of the changes you should keep in mind as you build applications on Facebook, integrate Facebook Connect into your website, or build applications to support Facebook Pages.

First and foremost, you'll want to create great Feed stories from within your application or website to take advantage of the new opportunities.

Contents 1 New Home Page Components 2 Emphasizing What Users Are Sharing 3 Overview of API Enhancements 4 What You Should Do Now

New Home Page Components

The upcoming changes to the home page take the News Feed and make it a more dynamic stream of information and content that users are sharing in their own voice.

The main components of the new home page are:

Stream

The new stream on the home page will include all posts by a user's friends. Every post that a user publishes through the Publisher or from Feed forms within your application or site will appear directly in the stream of the user's friends. The stream will format all stories in the current short story size. The stream will not include one-line stories that are automatically published through APIs, though these will continue to appear on profiles and impact the Highlights section mentioned below.

Filters

Filters will allow users to view streams from different lists of friends or from specific applications. By default, several common Facebook applications will be listed as filters. Users can choose additional applications from a drop-down list and add them as permanent filters. The applications that users and their friends frequently use and have multiple stories available for a user to view are most likely to appear in this list. This can be a great way for your application to gain additional visibility and usage.

Publisher

The Publisher on the home page will be an improved version of the current Publisher that appears on user profile pages. All existing Publisher integrations will be supported and will now be available directly from users' home pages. In the new Publisher, the comment will appear above the attachment and is intended to represent what the user is saying about the content they are sharing. This new Publisher will appear on user profiles as well. Please see below for more information about the Publisher size.

Highlights

The Highlights area features content with which a user's friends have interacted. Applications will frequently appear in the highlights area based on how often a users' friends interact with the application.

Two additional changes you may notice:

1. To create more space on the page for dynamic content, we've consolidated the bookmarks into the bottom bar of the screen with the Applications menu. This has already become the most common way for users to access their applications, and we'll continue working on more ways for users to find and access their applications.
2. The number of outstanding requests will appear at the top of the screen, after "welcome [name]".

Emphasizing What Users Are Sharing

The new stream is focused on what users are saying and sharing with their friends. As we make these changes, we encourage you to think about the Feed stories from your applications and help focus those around enabling users to share content in their own words.

Feed stories should:

• Reflect sharing the results of direct user action or content users want to share.
• Be written in the user's voice (instead of reporting).
• Include rich content from your application - text, images, video, Flash.

For example, instead of saying "Josh posted a photo" with a description underneath the photo, the story will now include the user comment at the top, and then the body will simply contain the photo and perhaps context about when or where the photo was taken. Or instead of saying "Josh just rated a movie", the user comment can be a short review of the movie or just "5 stars, it was great" and the body would contain an image and description of the movie.

The new Feed form will offer the user a chance to add an additional comment as they publish content to their profile. This will take the existing story title, story body, and media item and attach them to the user's comment when this gets published. Going forward, the new Feed form will only support what is currently the short story size.

Read below about the new APIs that will allow you to extend the new Feed forms and Feed publishing to pre-fill and access the comments users make as they are publishing stories. All of your Feed stories will be migrated automatically and work in the new Feed forms. We encourage you to take any user comments in your Feed stories and use those comments to pre-fill the user comment section.

Overview of API Enhancements

We've expanded on a few aspects of the Platform API for the new stream.

On April 27, 2009, we released the Open Stream API, which contains new API methods, FQL tables, and an Activity Streams implementation for reading from and writing to users' and Pages' streams.

In March, 2009, existing methods were enhanced as follows:

• Facebook.showFeedDialog and JS_API_M_FB.Connect.showFeedDialog now take two extra, optional parameters:
  • user_message_prompt, which is a text entry field that appears next to the prompt on a Feed form where the user can write "What’s on your mind?".
  • user_message, which is the default text that appears in the user_message_prompt. You need to include this text in a value object that gets passed with this parameter.
• We deprecated the story_size parameter for JS_API_M_FB.Connect.showFeedDialog.
• feed.publishUserAction now can take a user_message parameter that gets appended to any short stories published on behalf of a user, provided the user has specified to allow your application to always publish short stories. Please note that the user_message parameter is not supported with 1-line stories.
• We made the following changes to Feed stories:
  • Full stories are no longer displayed on the home page or profile.
  • Feed stories published by feed.publishUserAction appear only on the user's Wall.
  • You are no longer required to provide a title for short story templates.
  • We no longer aggregate Feed stories, so you don't need to create an array of templates of a given size or call Feed.registerTemplateBundle.
  • One-line stories will only appear on the Profile in the "recent activity" section. They will not appear in the stream.

What You Should Do Now

Your Feed stories should continue to work as is.

However, if you have any user-generated content in your feed stories such as a review or user comment, you should redo your feed templates and start passing that in as "user message" parameter rather than in the body of the feed stories.

We encourage you to think about using Feed forms and prompting publishing of stories from within your application or website whenever appropriate. Stories published through Feed forms will probably see more distribution than they do today through News Feed since each time a user directly publishes a short story it will automatically appear in their friends' News Feeds. If you are using automatic publishing (that is, through feed.publishUserAction) to publish one-line stories, those will continue to appear on users' profiles. And auto-published stories will be used to help aggregate application stories that will appear in the Highlights section of the new home page.

The full story size is no longer supported. You can continue to pass it in, but it will not appear on Facebook profiles or home pages. Also be aware that aggregation of short Feed stories using Feed templates will no longer happen on the home page, so you will not need to continue designing for that model.

If you currently support a Publisher integration, please be aware that the width of the Publisher will be changing and become somewhat narrower. As such, we encourage you to redesign your publisher integration to be "fluid" design instead of a fixed width for more flexibility. Publishers that are fluid layout will appear inline in the experience. Publishers at the older fixed width will appear in a popup when a user selects them. We will offer a way to let you specify when your Publisher supports a fluid layout.