Want a more effective way of testing out how the Facebook Graph API functions? While you can currently use CURL to run basic tests, Apigee has launched a new service that enables developers to do quick testing of the entire API without having to deal with much of the OAuth authentication process. After taking a look at the product, I have to admit that this is a real time saver for any developers who haven’t already built a testing platform of their own.
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Launch a social media campaign that will build your brand and deliver results in our online Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting June 7. Speakers include Abigail Cusick (Bravo Digital), Gregory Galant (Sawhorse Media), Alex Leo (Thomson Reuters Digital), Jim Tobin (Ignite Social Media), and many more. Read the reviews. 
Today Facebook will be formerly announcing the official roll out of the new permissions dialog to all applications. Developers that haven’t made the switch could see their applications fail, if not implemented by July 14th. The new permissions system consolidates all requests to a single dialog box. We’ve covered the shift extensively over the past few weeks as it applies to developers, however all users will see the shift take place later today.
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Two companies agreeing to work together typically isn’t news-worthy, however yesterday’s announcement between Facebook and CrowdStar received a lot of attention. The attention was most likely a result of it being the second 5-year Credits relationship Facebook, following Zynga who hasn’t yet announced an exclusive integration of Facebook Credits. Neither agreement announcement included many details, however this time around, CrowdStar has announced exclusive use of Facebook Credits within their games.
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Want to scrape Facebook’s site for content? You may want to reconsider how you do so as Facebook has updated their Robots.txt file to be a bit more restrictive. If you aren’t aware of what a Robots.txt file is, you can read more here. Ultimately the Robots.txt file simply restricted certain pages from being indexed by anybody. Now Facebook has become more explicit within the file, limiting indexing to Baidu, Google, MSN, Naver, Slurp, Yandex, and other search engines. The company has also linked to the “Automated Data Collection Terms” page.
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Over the past few days the rumor mills have been buzzing as news emerged that Google is working on a potential “Facebook killer”. This comes only days after we published about Facebook’s search strategy which could eventually become a direct competitor to Google. One thing is increasingly clear: this year could soon shape up to be more about Facebook versus Google in contrast to last year’s “Facebook versus Twitter” theme.
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Facebook has added a new feature to our News Feeds. When you hover your mouse over a name or a website, additional information pops up in a small box. This rollover action appears to make it easier to find out information about people and websites, as well as send messages or add new friends with only a single click. What do you think about this new feature?
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This afternoon Rich Miller of DataCenterKnowledge posted an update from Tom Cook’s presentation at the Velocity conference last week which illustrates Facebook’s ongoing thirst for data storage and processing power. While Cook didn’t present any numbers, Rich Miller is estimating that the server count has most likely surpassed 60,000 servers at this point. I’m also proud to announce that our sites (AllFacebook & SocialTimes) are powered by a massive number of servers: 4.
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While many developers will be attending the Social Developer Summit tomorrow in San Francisco, there’s another great event (which is also free) taking place this evening in San Francisco for Facebook application developers. The event starts at 6:30 and will include drinks and pizza. If you are in town for Social Developer Summit and want another event to attend, I highly recommend going to it.
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We are looking forward to tomorrow’s Social Developer Summit being held in San Francisco. With all our speakers, sponsors, and everything else ready to go, the only thing left to know is what time to be there! The event will start promptly at 9:30 AM with registration opening at 8:30 AM. Approximately 500 people have registered to attend which means we’ll be hosting this conference again! Here’s everything you need to know for tomorrow.
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Years ago when Google began dominating the search industry, one of the biggest challenges for the search engines was discovering link farms. As Wikipedia describes, “a link farm is any group of web sites that all hyperlink to every other site in the group”. It was also an extremely effective technique for spamming search engines and boosting placement for various keywords. Now developers have created similar sites except instead of linking to places, the site encourages users to like objects.
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