Platform updates announced November 4th allow developers to more effectively surface Recent Activity stories, post game high scores to the Canvas ticker, and include location information in Graph API Posts. The high score feature comes off as the most notable item for game devs, as it’s likely to increase the virality of games that rely on competitive play.

The Recent Activity update allows Facebook to surface the automatically generated stories that occur when users participate in activities such as clicking Like, accepting a Friend Request, or an Event invitation directly in the News Feed. These stories and the people to whom they are tagged now show up in the FQL stream table and the Graph API Post object. When enabling Recent Activity, the story and story_tags field will return all Recent Activity stories along with users and pages those stories tag. Here’s Facebook’s example:

The high score option now allows game developers to publish high scores to the Canvas ticker using the Scores API. These posts are generated whenever a player achieves a score higher than their previous record for that game. Facebook notes that high scores are “all time high” records that persist even if a developer resets the scores for their game. Developers already publishing scores saw this change immediately.

Lastly, the November 4th updates now include location information on Graph API Post objects whenever that information is available. Facebook also updated the /feed and /home connections on the Graph API User to include location associated with posts. Post objects returned this way will show a place field in the JSON that details the Facebook page associated with the location. Here’s the example shown: