Zynga Game Network

Detailed Summary of Feed Story Changes & Implications for News Feed Distribution

August 25th, 2008

One major change in the new Facebook redesign is the combination of the Wall and Mini-Feed. And while the change is certainly significant from an end-user’s point of view, it is even moreso from a developer’s perspective. The News Feed system has been overhauled, with new publishing methods and story sizes for developers to utilize when creating feed stories.

Feed Story Templates

All feed stories are now required to be published using templates, which must be registered beforehand. Feed templates allow Facebook to aggregate and display multiple application stories simultaneously. More relevant stories that involve multiple friends (known as “targets”) will get more distribution, so users will view application stories as more engaging and useful overall.

Feed Story Sizes & News Feed Distribution

In addition to templates, three feed story sizes now exist:

  1. One Line - One lined stories are now the default size that an application can publish onto a user’s Mini Feed. These stories are typically 1 sentence long and can be easily aggregated by Facebook to display on friend’s News Feeds. These stories cannot have images in them, and are cached by Facebook once published.
  2. Short - These are medium sized stories which may contain images. This type of story is also cached on Facebook’s servers. Both One Line and Short stories may be published to friends’ News Feeds.
  3. Full - These stories are the equivalent of the wall attachments in the old profile design. They contain pre-formatted FBML and can be up to 700px in height. They are not cached and will not be published to friends’ News Feeds.

Here’s an example of a Short and One Line story, respectively:

Publishing from the Canvas Page with Feed Forms

While an application may publish a one line Feed Story through the API, Facebook is requiring the use of Feed Forms to publish Short and Full stories from the Canvas Page (though this is apparently a bug, as applications are supposed to be able to publish short and full stories from an API call so long as the user has previously granted the application permission to publish these story lengths). These forms are called via Javascript and generate a standardized Facebook dialog with the story along with options for the user to select the size to be published.

These standardized forms are also being used throughout the new profile design to prompt for application permissions, in an attempt to boost the poor reputation (with respect to actions performed on a user’s behalf) that applications have received within the Facebook platform thus far.

Here’s an example Feed Form dialog:

Additional Resources

More resources are available for technical details about the new feed stories and how to create them:

Check out The Facebook Marketing Bible: 39+ Ways to Market Your Brand, Company, Product, or Service Inside Facebook

Posted by Mike Knoop
Filed in Development, Facebook, Marketing

2 Responses to “Detailed Summary of Feed Story Changes & Implications for News Feed Distribution”

  1. Robert Says:
    September 6th, 2008 at 5:34 pm

    Despite using the new design for several weeks with most of my apps set to “Prompt me before publishing any stories”, I have yet to see one of these prompts.

    The stories for these apps sometimes appear on my wall, but most of the time they don’t.

  2. Mike Knoop Says:
    September 7th, 2008 at 12:00 am

    Well, it’s up to the application developer to decide whether or not to prompt you when publishing a story.

    If they choose to, the developer gets the added benefit of you potentially choosing a larger story size for that particular story. Otherwise, if they choose to publish it automatically, the story size is automatically limited to the size you have set for the application (default is a one-lined story).

    -Mike

Leave a Reply