Facebook Application Changes and How They Affect Your Widgets

In the past couple months Facebook has changed their application architecture a number of times, and we have steadily attempted to keep up with them (for the most part, successfully). Most recently however, the changes have been drastic enough that some of the widget applications based off of NewsGator widgets could be negatively affected, or even broken altogether.

The good news is that yesterday we loaded a new version of the Facebook wizard in Editor's Desk. If you have NewsGator widgets in Facebook, please test them to ensure they are working properly. If not, the act of simply stepping through the wizard will bring your widget up-to-date with Facebook’s framework. Don’t delete your existing apps, just use the wizard to copy fields from our wizard into your Facebook app, and vice versa.

Access the Facebook Wizard in Editor's Desk on the Manage page: simply expand your widget view, and in the tools menu on the left side you will see an icon for "Facebook."

Here are a couple important points:
--Facebook has moved to a new editor for Facebook Applications, which enforces a limit of 100 characters for URLs. If you open up an application with long URLs in the new editor and then save it, Facebook will truncate all the URLs behind-the-scenes, thus breaking the app. All the URLs we gave in previous versions of the Facebook Wizard were over 100 characters long, so this applies to all apps created through the Facebook Wizard, and likely ones made before we had a wizard.

--The profile page apparently has new size restrictions. From what we can tell it is 184px wide by 250px tall, but it isn't documented anywhere. This only applies to apps that use Flash or the “show an image on the profile page” option. You will have to make the image or Flash movie smaller.

If you have any questions at all please send us an email!

Comments

[CWD]

This is why I've stopped bothering with developing apps for Facebook. what a pain.
thanks for the update!