Inside Facebook

With the upcoming release of Facebook’s redesign, a couple new communication channels have been opened allowing application developers to communicate with users in new ways. Facebook has expanded the notifications API to include a new type of “announcement” notification, now being referred to as “application-to-user” notifications. These new notifications can effectively be used as general announcements and updates to users. Previously, the best solution for publishing this type of notification has been through the use of automated CRON scripts set to run daily.

There are no set “best practices” for application-to-user notifications yet, as Facebook is still making tweaks to their allocation limits for these new notifications. However, the current limit (7 notifications per user, per week is the maximum and default) seems to discourage any type of “real-time” application notifications and places more of an emphasis on general daily updates. For example, sending a notification to a user to alert them of new application features. They are not limited to application updates, though, and can be utilized in more creative manners, so long as you stay within allocation limits.

Application-to-user notifications can only be sent to current application users. Also note that they may be sent to any application user whether or not that user has an active application session-key.

Finally, when a user receives an application-to-user notification, it does not have any text pre-pended to the front of it. It simply displays your application icon next to the notification text. This is in contrast to user-to-user notifications which pre-pend the name of the user who performed the action to the notification. You can see an example of an application-to-user notification at the top of this post.

Technical details for the new application-to-user notifications have been slow forthcoming. Even the most recent PHP Client doesn’t include support for the new type yet. However, you can easily add support into the latest PHP Client by adding a small code snippet to your facebookapi_php5_restlib.php file (click here for code).

For more information on application-to-user notifications, see the Developers Forum and the Developers Wiki.