Facebook today provided updates regarding its transition from Credits to local currency pricing. The company offered new documentation for game developers and announced that migration will occur in Q3 this year.

Facebook decided to phase out Credits in favor of a user’s local currency — dollars, pounds or yen, for example — in June 2012. This allows the social network simplify the purchase experience and give developers more flexibility. Developers will be able to set more granular and consistent prices for non-U.S. users and price the same item differently on a market-by-market basis, as opposed to pricing their virtual goods in $0.10 USD increments as was required when Credits became mandatory in July 2011. This also eliminates any confusion that resulted from users trying to think about conversion rates for dollars, Credits and in-game currency.
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Facebook will no longer display mobile bookmarks for apps unless they are games that function on both mobile devices and the desktop canvas, according to a post on the company’s developer blog.

Bookmarks were likely not driving much traffic to most mobile apps so it wasn’t necessary to keep them around. However, Facebook wants to promote cross-platform game development so it will give them the benefit of mobile bookmarks. With fewer apps being included in the bookmarks menu, the few cross-platform games that do appear there could see more traffic than they were before.

The change goes into effect June 5.
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Along with a Timeline redesign, Facebook today announced new features for developers to get their apps more prominently featured on users’ profiles.

Timeline includes new app and activity-driven sections that users can customize to highlight the categories and apps that are most important to them. Developers can configure “collections,” which showcase a user’s activity in their app. For example, Foursquare displays a user’s check-ins, badges, top places, saved places and map. These app sections will replace Timeline “aggregations,” which didn’t necessarily include all Open Graph stories and were not easily discoverable in the old UI. However, developers who previously configured aggregations will need to now create collections, which must be approved by Facebook.

When users add an app section, they can choose where it appears among their other sections, and it will remain there until they edit the order or visibility of the section. Previously, app modules would appear sporadically on Timeline. Users couldn’t control which apps were displayed or in what order. App sections also weren’t available on mobile before, but are in the latest update.

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Facebook today announced a new technical conference series for mobile developers to learn about incorporating Facebook into their apps and to connect with engineers and product managers from the platform team.

Mobile DevCon 2013 will take place in New York on April 18, London on May 2, and Seoul on May 7. The conference is free, but developers must apply to attend and space is limited. Facebook says this is a “highly technical event” that will dive “deep in product and code.”

Topics for the conference include how to implement Facebook’s mobile SDKs to drive installs and engagement, using Facebook Login, Open Graph best practices, creating social mobile games, design and product tips, as well as a look at the tools, libraries and techniques Facebook uses to build its own mobile applications. The company says insights from Fab.com, GetGlue, Zeebox, EyeEm and other mobile developers will be part of the agenda. At the end of the day, developers will have opportunities to speak one-on-one with Facebook employees about their apps.
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Facebook today announced new ways for lifestyle apps to tap into Open Graph with verbs:  run, walk, bike, rate, quote, want to read and want to watch.

These will be known as “built-in” or “common” actions, making them similar to how read, watch and listen can be incorporated into third-party applications. Although developers have been able to create their own custom actions with Open Graph, built-in actions help Facebook better understand the relationship between objects so that it can properly organize them in News Feed, Timeline aggregations and eventually search.

For example, if three of a user’s friends rate the same movie, Facebook can group those actions into a single News Feed story. Those stories can also include elements like star ratings or a fitness app could show stats from a user’s workout. Facebook says these features have improved the clickthrough rates for developers who have been testing them, such as Rotten Tomatoes and MapMyFitness. Other apps that have already added these actions include Nike, Runkeeper, GoodReads, Hulu and more. (more…)

Facebook today announced that it will once again accept new applications to the Preferred Marketing Developer Program, but with two key changes. Applicants must be referred by a Facebook employee or an existing PMD and there will be additional requirements for earning badges.

Current PMDs will have six months to ensure that they meet the new standards for maintaining their badges.

Earlier this year Facebook had temporarily closed its PMD program to new candidates, while it reconsidered its requirements and overall process as a result of the volume of applications it was receiving. The company periodically revises its criteria for entry and for awarding its qualification badges in ads, apps, insights and pages. This time around it is putting more emphasis on skills and software related to advertising and reporting.
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Facebook today launched an update for the Facebook SDK for iOS, which seeks to make it easier and faster to develop socially integrated mobile apps and provide developers with better app analytics.

With Facebook SDK version 3.2, developers will be able to track conversions beyond installs. This means that developers will be able to see whether their mobile app install ads resulted in additional in-app purchases, engagement or other important events. Developers can install mobile pixels on the app pages they want to measure, such as a level completion, shopping cart or checkout page. With this in place, developers can optimize their ads for these conversions so that they don’t just get installs, but high quality users.
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Facebook is not currently accepting applicants for its Preferred Marketing Developer program as it reconsiders its badge requirements and process as a result of the volume of applications, a spokesperson from the company tells us.

Business Insider today reported that the social network had “halted” the PMD program. A Facebook spokesperson clarified to us that the program is still in effect, though new applicants are temporarily not being reviewed. The company periodically revises its criteria for entry and for awarding its qualification badges: ads, apps, insights and pages. The revised process and requirements are planned to go live in the next few weeks, after which point, Facebook will ask new developers to reapply.

Business Insider published an email Facebook sent to a developer who tried to apply to become a PMD, which indicated that the new application process will be based on a referral system and the new badge criteria will emphasize paid media, along with being able to help brands with owned and earned strategies.

“Please note that if you do not buy ads or sponsored stories on behalf of your clients, you will need to show us that you have the ability to pitch a Facebook holistic strategy and influence your clients on media spend,” the email said.
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This is a guest post by LifeStreet Media CEO Mitchell Weisman.

Facebook is announcing its Q4 2012 earnings on Wednesday, which seems like a perfect opportunity to reflect on the major trends and developments that impacted the Facebook app ecosystem in the last year. From our perspective at LifeStreet Media, three major themes emerged: renewed focus on monetization, significant growth in the gaming channel, and increased adoption of the mobile web. Check out some of the details below.

Theme 1: 2012 was the year Facebook and its app developers got serious about app monetization

Many app developers first realized the power of Facebook as a development platform back in 2010. That was a major growth year for the Facebook app ecosystem, as the number of apps on the platform skyrocketed 512 percent. In 2011 and 2012, though, the market began maturing, and the number of apps rose only modestly by 0.4 percent in 2011 and 2 percent in 2012 (AppData, 2009-2012). During these two years, an increasing number of developers opted for competitive platforms.

In 2012, amidst increasing competition for the hearts and minds of app developers, Facebook released a number of platform changes intended to address two of the biggest factors impacting developers’ long-term success: discoverability and monetization. Facebook launched the new app center to help with discoverability, and to address monetization they released the ability to charge subscription fees for apps, transitioned Facebook credits to local currencies, and improved payment flows for in-app purchases.

Developers applauded Facebook’s changes, but also took their own active steps to monetize their inventory.  Despite only modest gains in the number of apps on Facebook in 2012, LifeStreet Media, the largest in-app ad provider on Facebook, actually experienced significant increases in the number of developers monetizing apps with us. The number of app developers publishing ads on our app inventory rose 68 percent year-over-year from Q4 2011 to Q4 2012. In addition, the number of “ad placements” for display ads within each app increased 74 percent year-over-year from Q4 2011 to Q4 2012, meaning that developers saw that monetization through advertising was working for them and increased the number of ads that they allowed per app. See details below showing a temporary decrease in ad placements in Q1 but then significant quarterly growth thereafter. Ad placements peaked in Q2, up 27 percent over the previous quarter, and publisher growth peaked in Q4 2012, up 20.2 percent over Q3.

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Facebook today announced new “flexible sentences” options for apps that publish to Facebook using custom Open Graph verbs.

Developers can now better control the sentence structure for stories that users share from their apps. Not only can they edit the tenses of their custom verbs, they can add additional text to provide more information about the activity. Although it adds another layer of complexity to Open Graph, this change allows developers create more compelling stories for their apps, which could lead users to share more and lead more of their friends to discover the app. See the Songkick example below, which now has added context to make it clearer what it means to “track” and artist:

To help developers prioritize which story formats to adjust, Facebook’s sentence configuration tool will now note which stories are shared and viewed most frequently. The percentage of impressions a story format receives will be listed to the right. By clicking “Edit” next to the percentage, developers can add free-form text or property expressions. Developers can also remove objects from the sentence. Facebook pointed out an example for a hiking app, which would not want to share the story “Horatio hiked a hike on Social Hiking.” Instead, it could remove the object and change the app attribution to say “Horatio hiked using Social Hiking.”

Flexible sentences are available to developers starting today, though they only apply to custom actions. Apps that use Facebook’s built-in verbs like read, watch or listen cannot be customized this way. Developers who modify their existing actions to change their tense or sentence format will need to resubmit their actions for approval.

A basic how-to for flexible sentences is available here.