The Facebook Platform application permissions framework and UI has undergone many changes throughout the last few years. In the beginning, before there were many constraints on developers publishing content into the News Feed, developers took advantage of the opportunity to publish more content than many users wanted. As a result, most recently, Facebook has adopted a stricter stance on permissions, requiring users to manually post content into the stream through the Share dialog.

Today, Facebook announced a new permissions dialog along with the launch of the new profile timeline that once again allows users to authorize developers one time to post content to their profile on an going basis. However, in this version of the permissions model, the up-front authorization only applies to posting activity to the timeline — i.e. these stories will not appear in a user’s friends’ News Feeds. We’ll have more details on the way this applies to existing app permissions soon.