On Tuesday we published the results of a study indicating that Pages that sync or auto-post their content to Facebook from Twitter or blogs using tools like HootSuite, Twitter, and NetworkedBlogs receive significantly fewer Likes and comments per posts than those that post manually using Facebook’s web and mobile interfaces.

This is partly because Facebook consolidates into a folded thread all posts from across Pages and friends in a user’s news feed that were published through the same tool, displaying a “Show x more posts from [publisher app] link”.

We’ve now learned that Facebook maintains a secret whitelist of companies that are exempt from having content posted through their publishers consolidated across different Pages and clients. This protects them from a reduction in news feed impressions. The whitelist includes some top enterprise Page management tools from the Preferred Developer Consultant program including Buddy Media, Vitrue, Involver, Context Optional and Syncapse. Facebook has forbidden those included from discussing the existence of the whitelist. Facebook has confirmed with us that “trusted partners” are having their posts treated differently.

Since consolidation negatively impacts Page post engagement and other key performance indicators, brands have to consider using whitelisted publishing tools. If they aren’t already, they should out of necessity either ask their Page management solution provider about gaining admission to the whitelist, or switch to a tool protected from consolidation. Overall, the surfacing of the consolidation whitelist may anger developers not on it, and push Facebook to change its policy on whose posts are consolidated.

Here’s some more context on what’s happening. In order to gain the maximum exposure, clicks, and other key performance metrics from publishing to the news feed, Facebook Pages need to optimize their EdgeRank, or prominence in the news feed. To do so, they need to consistently publish compelling and widely seen updates to draw Likes and comment that improve their EdgeRank.

However, Facebook has an automated system in place originally designed to collapse flurries of posts published by users playing spammy social games. That system causes any posts present in a user’s news feed that were published by an API publishing tool with a same App ID, whether from one or many Pages or users, to be consolidated into threads that show one post but require users to click to unfold and view the rest of the posts. Since users don’t always unfold the threads, consolidation reduces the impressions of posts, giving them fewer opportunities to score feedback that helps their EdgeRank.

The study by EdgeRank Checker and another by Momentus Media show reductions in post engagement rates by as much as 70% for Pages using third-party publishing tools that have posts consolidated across Pages. This engagement reduction cannot be entirely attributed to consolidation, as differences in the content of scheduled or syndicated posts, Page size, and the types of companies that pay for third-party tools all impact engagement as well. Still, post consolidation does negatively impact impression rates, and therefore publishing apps that cause posts to be consolidated should not be used by brands.

To insulate some of the world’s biggest brands who are also heavy advertisers on Facebook, as well as some of the biggest third-party Page management companies from its Preferred Developer Consultant program, Facebook quietly offered admission to a post consolidation whitelist to a few Page management developers. Tools whose App IDs are whitelisted do not have their posts consolidated across Pages (though, in some cases, a single client’s Page may have its own posts consolidated together if it posts multiple times in rapid succession).

Brands using tools on the whitelist have an advantage over their competitors, as they can attain more news feed exposure for their posts. Page management companies can use the higher engagement rates afforded them by the whitelist to attract clients. Page management companies left off this whitelist may feel the double standard is unfair, especially if brands using Twitter, HootSuite, TweetDeck, or NetworkedBlogs ditch them for whitelisted tools.

Executives of Page management companies tell us they don’t believe Facebook was intending to penalize any publishing tool developers with the consolidation system, and rather it was a holdover from a spam prevention effort that Facebook has since handled by limiting how much game content appears in the news feed.

[Update: Facebook has responded to our inquiry about the existence of the whitelist saying "We're focused on ensuring that users see the highest quality stories in News Feed. As part of this, related stories are typically aggregated so users can see a consolidated view of stories from one app. In some cases, we work closely with trusted partners, such as Preferred Developer Consultants, to test new ways of surfacing stories, and gather feedback to improve the Platform experience."

Though Facebook calls this a "test", the exemption of certain tools from post consolidation has been going on for many months. The whitelist could therefore be interpreted as favoritism rather than just an attempt to gather data to improve the user experience.]

Exempting trusted publishers from post consolidation may have intended as a temporary solution until a more sophisticated way to keep individual publishers from overrunning the news feed could be developed. But in the meantime, the whitelist has created an uneven playing field where certain publishers and the brands that use them receive much less visibility in the news feed than others.

If Facebook wants to keep the long-tail of third-party developers happy and working on its Platform, it will need to provide more transparency around how the post consolidation system currently works. It will also need to quickly fix it so no publishing tools and their brand clients are penalized for legitimate promotion in an effort to control game spam.

[Thanks to Momentus Media for data that informed this post]

UK Won’t Ban Facebook – Facebook, Twitter and Research In Motion met with United Kingdom officials Thursday regarding the social networks’ role in summer riots there. The government ended up not moving to restrict access to the social networks in emergencies such as riots.

Facebook Takes Third Spot for Video – Facebook becomes the third largest video site on the Internet, comScore reported. That is 51.5 million people who watched videos on the platform in July.

AT&T to Discontinue Facebook Phone – AT&T is reportedly set to drop its “Facebook phone” called the Status, according to TechCrunch.

Places More Popular Than Foursquare – London developer Golden Gekko reports its clients report much more Facebook check-ins than Foursquare in Europe. Magnus Jern reported that the ratio ranged from 5-10 to 1. However, the future of the service is unclear.

Facebook Hit 1 Trillion Pageviews - Facebook surpassed 1 trillion pageviews according to Google’s Ad Planner tool, although comScore says otherwise.

Facebook Mobile App to Offer Photo Filters - Facebook looks to be competing with Instagram’s classy mobile app by offering almost a dozen photo filters to its mobile own application — following Facebook’s attempt to buy the startup, according to The New York Times. News of the feature first leaked out in June.

Recapping Facebook’s Bug Bounty – Neal Poole did a basic rundown of Facebook’s Security Bug Bounty program, which included information about multi-line JavaScript URI, redirects preserving fragment portions of URLs, XSS filters and more.

Facebook Wraps Up Farm Bureau Dispute – Facebook and the Farm Bureau had a dispute over Facebook trademarking “FB,” but it seems like the lawsuit is set to be wrapped up.

Milyoni Chart for Credits – Milyoni created a nice chart and whitepaper that includes ways that Facebook Credits can, and cannot, be used.

Facebook to Open Second Campus - Facebook is set to open up an additional campus from its current Menlo Park, Calif. headquarters. The second campus pwill be southwest of the current location, to be constructed in 2013 to accommodate about 2,800 employees.

Ticketmaster Allows Users to Find Friends – Line Nation’s Ticketmaster service launched an app that allows users to see where their friends are sitting on seat maps and tag themselves.

BBC Does Facebook On-Demand Video – BBC has developed an on-demand Facebook application allowing users to rent episodes from the show “Top Gear” for 48 hours.

ShopIgniter, Involver Partner – The two companies are entered into a partnership to help online retail businesses with a management content system.

Facebook today announced changes to its Ad Guidelines that permit advertising for several verticals that were previously prohibited. Offline gambling can be promoted, as can online gambling if ads are targeted outside of the US and have Facebook’s explicit consent.

Lottery commissions and legal dietary supplements may also be promoted with some restrictions. Ads for online pharmacies are prohibited unless they are certified and approved by Facebook

The changes will give a wider range of industries the opportunity to attain customers through Facebook highly targetable ads, and could generate more advertising revenue for the social network.

Facebook recently eased some of its promotion guidelines, removing prohibitions of contests, sweepstakes and other promotions of gambling and some other verticals. However, the continued prohibition of these industries in the Ad guidelines and Platform Policies restricted exactly what these promotions could include.

Now, Facebook has also eased its Ad Guidelines for some of these verticals, which could create significant new advertising opportunities for some industries. Below we’ll list the changed Ad Guidelines, and follow up with analysis exactly what has changed and how this impacts advertisers:

Gambling

III. Ad Content

       E. Gambling and Lotteries

Ads that promote or facilitate online gambling, games of skill or lotteries, including online casino, sports books, bingo, or poker, are only allowed in specific countries with prior authorization from Facebook.

Lottery commissions licensed or sponsored by government entities may advertise on Facebook; provided that ads must be targeted in accordance with applicable law in the jurisdiction in which the ads will be served and may only target users in the jurisdiction in which the lottery is available.

Ads that promote offline gambling establishments, such as offline casinos, in accordance with applicable laws and regulations, are generally permitted, provided that ads must be appropriately targeted.

The most significant of the changes is the permission of ads for offline gambling without the need for consent from Facebook, as long as ads are targeted to users over the legal age of 18 within countries where gambling is permitted.

Gambling ads may only be purchased through a direct sales partnership with Facebook, which requires a monthly minimum spend of $30,000, and may not be purchased through the self-serve ads tool or  the Facebook Ads API.

Facebook previously permitted ads for online gambling with permission, but it has now clarified that these ads must be targeted outside the US in addition to having the site’s consent. These changes will allow casinos and other offline gaming establishments to target nearby Facebook users with ads in hopes of enticing them to visit in person, and may boost confidence in understanding of the policy for online gambling advertisers.

Unofficial lotteries are regulated by guidelines for online gambling, but government authorized or sponsored lottery commissions are governed by separate guidelines. As long as they comply with local laws, and only target those of age in their jurisdiction, they may advertise without explicit consent from Facebook. The ability for state lottery commissions to geo-target their Facebook ads by state could help them efficiently increase sales.

Online Pharmacies Dietary Supplements

III. Ad Content

       F. Pharmaceuticals and Supplements

Ads must not promote the sale of prescription pharmaceuticals. Ads for online pharmacies are prohibited except that ads for certified pharmacies may be permitted with prior approval from Facebook.

Ads that promote dietary and herbal supplements are generally permitted, provided they do not promote products containing anabolic steroids, chitosan, comfrey, dehydroepiandrosterne, ephedra, human growth hormones, melatonin, and any additional products deemed unsafe or questionable by Facebook in its sole discretion.

Online pharmacies were not expressly prohibited before, but the guidelines now state they must be certified and have pre-approval from Facebook to run ads. This may close an advertising channel for some businesses.

Previously, Facebook prohibited ads for all “uncertified pharmaceutical products”. Now those that are legal, available without a perscription, and that don’t contain any of the above ingredients may be advertised. Facebook does reserve the right to deem products unsafe and pull their ads, though.

Businesses selling legal dietary supplements, as popularized by the book “The Four-Hour Work Week”, may now serve ads to Facebook users. By targeting Precise Interests such as “weight lifting” or using Facebook’s new Topic targeting system to reach those who’ve Liked Pages related to #weight training, these businesses may be able fo find a wealth of new customers.

Amongst a flurry of announcements about changes to games on its platform, Facebook recently updated the Developers Blog regarding the addition of a new Insights analytics tab for Facebook Credits. The latest Platform Update also included announcements about how app-to-user request notifications will now show the notification’s message; new capabilities for the Graph API, activity and recommendation plugins, and the Graph API Explorer; as well as clarifications of two Facebook Platform Policies.

Developers of Facebook apps that use Facebook Credits will now or soon see a Credits tab in their Insights dashboard. Credits Insights graphs the information developers receive in their daily Credits reports, name spend, chargebacks, and refunds. Developers can select date ranges for these graphs, compare time periods, and export data in XLS or CSV format.

Credits Insights, accessible to those with the Administrator role on a given app, will help developers determine how effectively their apps and games are monetizing. The Insights graphs are more efficient for determining the impact of design changes or market forces on monetization than the more momentary Credits reports. With time, Facebook may add more data to Credits Insights that could help developers better understand who is spending within their apps, and what is convincing them to make purchases.

–

Facebook quietly changed some important Platform Policies recently, banning promotion of apps on some types of competing social platforms and restricting how developers can reward their users. In the Platform Update, it announced two smaller deletions from its policy document:

FPP IV.4: You must provide users with an easily identifiable “skip” option whenever you present users with an option to use a Facebook social channel.

Apps no longer have to include a skip option because apps must always obtain user consent before posting on their behalf.

FPP IV.5: You must not provide users with the option to publish more than one Stream story at a time.

This deletion permits apps to let users publish to the walls of multiple friends simultaneously. Group communication, group buying, multi-player gaming, and other types of apps will now be able to let users choose multiple recipients for a wall post rather than put users through several redundant share steps.

The policy was likely put in place initially to reduce the potential for wall post spam. However, Facebook has been refining its app quality ranking system such that apps that publish posts that are frequently hidden or marked as spam will receive fewer impressions of their news feed content and risk suspension. Facebook apparently sees these repercussions as adequate to discourage spam.

App to user Request notifications that appear in the Apps and Games Dashboards now include the message originally included with the Request, making them a more effective method for developers to communicate with their users and ping them with calls to action. Before, these notifications didn’t include the message. The change could increase the conversion rate on app-to-user Requests. The counters for pending Requests will also appear in the new Games Ticker.

Developers using Facebook’s Activity or Recommendations plugins now have the option to prevent old or outdated content from appearing in the plugins. The  max_age field lets developers set the number of days within which a URL must have been created to be eligible for display within the plugin.

For example, ’0′ would make all stories show up regardless of URL creation date similar to how the plugin worked before, whereas ’14′ would require the URL to have been created in the last two weeks. The option will make the plugins more useful to developers of sites focused on breaking news or other real-time content.

The Graph API Explorer now permits developers to quickly generate access tokens for one of the apps they admin. This will make it easier to test APIs that require users to grant permissions to an app.

–

Rather than using the legacy REST API, developers can now determine if a user Likes a Page using the Graph API call:

https://graph.facebook.com/me/likes/PAGE_ID
&access_token=ACCESS_TOKEN

This could help apps determine if a user is eligible to see fan-only content protected by a Like-gate.

Facebook has updated its Platform Polices, prohibiting apps from linking to or promote apps on competing social platforms, and from rewarding users with virtual currency, goods, or downloads through a third-party for taking an action. These policy changes, reported by TechCrunch, will prevent developers from directing traffic from their Facebook apps to off-site destinations, or from incentivizing user actions unless done with Facebook Credits or without the aid of third-parties.

The policy changes were not announced on the Facebook Developer Blog or anywhere else. Facebook may only enforce the ban on linking to competitors in more aggressive cases. Still, fear of enforcement may limit how developers can promote versions of their apps on other platforms such as Google+’s recently launched games platform, hampering growth for both developers and platform owners.

Banning Cross-Platform Promotion

Facebook already prohibited advertising for competing social platforms on its website. Now it’s Platform Policies states “I.11 – Apps on Facebook may not integrate, link to, promote, distribute, or redirect to any app on any other competing social platform.”

This policy update could be seen as an extension of that ban, meant to cover developers who are effectively advertising within the real estate of their own games. Alternatively, it could seen as an limiting developers from driving engagement on other platforms from users whose engagement they won on Facebook. Many Facebook developers currently use banners and pop-ups on their canvas apps, as well as Facebook wall posts to promote their presence across the web.

Much will depend on how Facebook interprets “social platform”. If this is taken to mean other web services offering a very similar developer platform within a social network, such as Google+, it would be more sensible, though a sign that Facebook believes these platforms have the potential to serious complete with it. If the term is interpreted to include vastly different mediums such as mobile or console app and game platforms, it could prohibit developers from offering users a more 360 degree experience, where they could play different parts of the same game or access different functionalities of an app while on their mobile device.

UPDATE: Facebook has clarified that the policy update does not apply to cross-promotion of mobile apps or off-platform apps available through a developer’s homepage. Read more on our sister site, Inside Social Games.

If cross-platform promotion is important to a developer, they may either have to leave Facebook, or silo their Facebook app or game experience while their presence on more open social platforms seamlessly integrate across mediums and platforms.

Fewer Incentive Options

Beginning July 1st when Facebook made Credits the mandatory exclusive payment method for Facebook games, it restricted how developers could reward users. Essentially, developers could only reward users with:

• Anything if through Facebook’s approved offer partners
• A developer’s own virtual goods or currency if a third-party isn’t involved
• Only a developer’s own virtual goods through a third-party if the offer didn’t require a user’s personally identifiable information

A recent set of updates to Zynga’s S-1 document sheds new light about the company’s business position, as it prepares for an initial public offering. For starters, Google has indeed invested, although the terms were not disclosed.

More interesting is the special relationship that Facebook and Zynga have formalized over revenue and traffic, in two developer addendums. (You can find the full set of docs here, although sadly some of the most interesting bits have been removed).

At first glance, the terms read as if Zynga had a special deal with Facebook, where it gets a portion of the ad revenue from Facebook ad units that run alongside its games in canvas apps. However, the terms specific that it is not canvas app ad revenue – instead, it’s referring to Zynga web sites like FarmVille.com, or even Facebook ads that might run within games.

We asked Facebook about the matter and got this response: “When we reached our agreement with Zynga last year, we discussed the possibility of displaying ads sold by Facebook on some of Zynga’s own pages. This isn’t something we’ve opted to do so far, and we are not working on an ad network right now.”

> Continue reading on Inside Social Games.

Facebook today apologized for suddenly disabling certain apps last month, saying that it “over-weighted certain types of user feedback, causing us to erroneously disable some apps”.

It has also taken several steps to help avoid issues like this in the future. New feedback metrics and a benchmark for how much negative feedback is unacceptable have been added to Application Insights. A new granular enforcement system has been instituted such that only the an app’s social channels that are drawing negative feedback will be blocked. Finally, rather than temporarily deleting apps, those subject to suspension are put in Disabled Mode so developers can still “test the app, edit settings, and view Insights.”

These changes should increase developer confidence in the Platform and allow them to test new communication and viral features without risking that their entire app might be deleted.

During the last week of June, Facebook changed how negative feedback for apps was weighted in its automatic app spam-prevention enforcement system. For instance, an app’s wall posts being marked as spam were more likely to trigger enforcement. This caused some apps to suddenly be deleted, infuriating developers.

Facebook allowed affected developers to appeal the enforcement, and began reinstating some of the disabled apps, though others such as Game of Truth are still disabled. Being disabled, even for only a short time, negatively impacts monetization as well as user growth and retention. Some developers said they had been treated unfairly, and that there was no way of telling how much negative feedback was too much. Others wanted the ability to modify and test their apps instead of being locked out while they were suspended.

A statement from Facebook today noted that “we realize that any downtime has a significant impact on both our developers and users. Many of our developers have chosen to build their businesses on top of Facebook, and we take that responsibility very seriously.” In an effort to make its enforcement system more predictable and rebuild trust with developers, it has now answered many of the requests of the affected developers with policy changes and data that should be available to all developers soon.

New Feedback Metrics in Application Insights

Developers will now see a News Feed tab in their Application Insights that displays positive and negative feedback. A spam reports per story published graph includes a benchmark in the form of green and red zones that indicates whether an app is receiving enough negative feedback to warrant enforcement. In the screenshot Facebook provides, it appears that 0.0023 spam reports per story is the threshold, though this could be different for different apps.

The new metrics will let developer test viral mechanisms and accurately assess whether they are causing too many spam reports. This transparency should increase developer trust in the Platform. However, it might degrade the use experience by encouraging developers to be as spammy as possible while still remaining under the threshold.

Granular Enforcement

Previously, too much negative feedback to usage of a single social channel would cause an entire app to be disabled. This could have caused unforseen consequences of a new viral mechanism or a negative response to a tertiary social channel to bring down an entire app. It also made it less clear what a developer needed to change to return to good standing with Facebook.

Now Facebook will use a granular enforcement system whereby only the social channel causing the negative feedback will be disabled. Facebook explains that “for example, if an app is generating a lot of negative feedback via chat messages, we will take action only on that app’s ability to publish to chat but otherwise leave the app intact.” This will make it much more obvious what mechanism must be modified for an app to be reinstated.

Developers can also appeal granular enforcement rather than the suspension of their entire app. Apps drawing negative feedback across channels are still subject to disablement.

Disabled Mode

Before today, if an app was disabled, it was effectively deleted, becoming completely unavailable to both a user and its developer. This prevented developers from checking Insights logs, testing their apps, and making changes to their settings or the app itself. Combined with enforcement emails that don’t always include enough detail for developers to learn what they were doing wrong, this prevented devs quickly fixing their apps and appealing the enforcement.

Now disabled apps are placed in Disabled Mode, which makes them unavailable to users, but developers can still access them.

Incidents like what happened at the end of June can send ripples through the development community, leading some to consider switching to making apps for other platforms such as iOS or Android. With Facebook looking to compete with these mobile operating systems in the near future, it needs both top app makers and the long tail of developers behind it.

It’s somewhat surprising that Facebook made the mistake of letting its auto-enforcement system get too aggressive considering its turbulent history with developers. Even more so because it’s been focusing on improving developer relations over the past months with its “Operation: Developer Love”. The Facebook developer community might not be quick to forget, but these changes might make it more willing to forgive.

Late last week, a Google Chrome browser extension called Facebook Friend Exporter received a flood of new interest as Google+ users looked for a way to import their Facebook friends into Google’s social network, Circles. However, since the app collects contact information from Facebook, it violate’s the site’s terms of service, and Facebook implemented a throttling mechanism that prevents it from scraping email addresses.

LinkedIn also blocked two Facebook professional networking apps: BranchOut for trying to profit from pulling in LinkedIn profile data into an enterprise recruiting search tool,and Monster’s BeKnown for sending promotional messages through LinkedIn’s messages API. These are the latest examples of long-running issues with platform owners and developers both trying to provide the same value to users and customers.

Facebook Prohibits Data Scrapers

The Facebook Friend Exporter was originally released by open source software developer, Mohamed Mansour, in November 2010. Similar to some other Facebook-altering browser extensions such as Better Facebook that violate the terms of service, the extension was ignored by Facebook until it received too much attention and was perceived as a threat to the company’s efforts to control core value, this time in the form of its user growth and retention.

Facebook Friend Exporter scrapes the email addresses and other contact info of a user’s friends, and allows them to be downloaded as a Google Contacts or .csv file that could then be imported into Gmail, allowing users to more easily recreate their Facebook social graph on Google Circles. This violates section 3.2 of the TOS that states “You will not collect users’ content or information, or otherwise access Facebook, using automated means (such as harvesting bots, robots, spiders, or scrapers) without our permission.”

In a past spat with Google over data portability, Facebook has claimed that users don’t own the email addresses of friends, and therefore may not export them .The social graphs it holds for users are Facebook’s most valuable asset and its core advantage over Google+, so allowing these graphs to be scraped and imported into Circles represented a clear threat to Facebook.

Facebook Friend Exporter’s download site now says it has 22,414 users, with 22,092 installing the extension in the last week. This spike in usage and press about the extension alerted Facebook to it, leading it to alter its mobile site the email addresses of friends disappear from their profiles if a user’s account quickly views the profiles of more than five friends. This prevents the extension from scraping a user’s entire friend list.

Mansour claims a new version that circumvents Facebook’s blocking mechanism on the way. Users should install Facebook Friend Exporter at their own risk, as its usage could constitute a TOS violation that could lead a user’s account to be suspended.

Update: As our commenter Jan notes, scrapers of this nature also create data security risks for users. If scrapers like Facebook Friend Exporter was allowed, hackers who gain access to a user’s account could steal the email addresses of all their friends. Developer of such plugins could also be collecting any of the scraped email addresses. Therefore, blocking access to these types of scrapers is not only good for Facebook in a competitive sense, but it also protects users.

LinkedIn Moves Against Facebook-Based Competitors

Over the past month, professional networking Facebook app BranchOut saw a spike in usage grow it to 250,000 daily active users, and job posting site Monster.com launched its own Facebook app for professional networking called BeKnown. Both apps allowed users to import their work history and other profile data from LinkedIn, and BeKnown let users send invites via the LinkedIn messages API.

BranchOut plans to release a premium enterprise recruiting search tool on August 1st that would allow the company to charge recruiters to search for job candidates by BranchOut profile information, including that pulled from LinkedIn. This violates LinkedIn’s terms of service, which prohibit the licensing or reselling of access to LinkedIn data. Therefore, LinkedIn has blocked BranchOut’s ability to import profile data.

However, BranchOut has responded stating that “Changes to the LinkedIn API have little impact on the BranchOut experience, as it was only being used by a small fraction of our users.”

BeKnown’s app also imported LinkedIn data, building the value of the product that Monster clients could have their job listings posted it. The app also sent promotional messages through the LinkedIn API, violating that site’s TOS. Both profile importation and messaging has now been blocked by LinkedIn.

Monster has responded saying “We are surprised and disappointed by LinkedIn’s decision, which we believe not only goes against the interests of LinkedIn users, but also contradicts what LinkedIn claims to stand for – openness and connectivity.”  BeKnown is urging users to leave comments of support on a post it made to the LinkedIn developer forum asking access to be reinstated. BeKnown may be more vulnerable than BranchOut to the API block because the fledgling, 10,000 DAU app was using LinkedIn messages to grow.

The blocking of apps by Facebook and LinkedIn is a sign of the growing pains of social platforms that with time have built valuable collections of user data. There’s a fine balance between promoting innovation and giving away competitive advantage. Developers should expect the platforms to protect themselves, and should know that just because they aren’t shut down immediately doesn’t mean their data usage has been approved. While there are monetary and philosophical rewards for operating in the gray area, there’s also great potential for loss of development resources.

Since the Facebook Platform’s launch four years ago in May 2007, the company has made many changes to its Platform APIs and Platform policies that have had significant ramifications for all developers in the Facebook ecosystem. And when Zynga goes public, the temperature of broader market’s perception of ramifications of changes that happen after that point will become much more visible.

For example, here are a few of the bigger changes to date:

• In 2009, Facebook suspended many applications for using ads provided by banned third party ad networks, sending ripple effects throughout the third party monetization ecosystem.
• In 2009 and 2010, Facebook made substantial changes to the way the news feed worked and removed application boxes from the profile page, two of many product updates that created significant changes for the ways some developers designed application interaction patterns for “viral” growth.
• This year, when Facebook announced Credits universal virtual currency would be mandatory and all other paid virtual currencies would be banned, this created major changes for developers’ payment flow designs and, not least, operating margins.

In general, when Facebook has made these changes, it has received feedback from developers through a variety of channels, including direct feedback to Facebook’s (relatively small) team of developer relationship managers, group meetings with larger developers concerned about specific changes, and public channels like the developer forums and comments here.

Less visibly, updates to Facebook’s broader Platform product and policy direction have clearly impacted the private financial markets as well. Funding has become harder to come by for many small developers over the last 18 months, though some larger and growing developers have still been raising money at healthy valuations.

However, when Zynga’s IPO occurs, the market will become the most visible real-time feedback channel yet for Facebook’s Platform product and policy teams. Although a couple of smaller developers, like SNAP Interactive, are listed (in STVI‘s case on the OTCBB), Zynga will be the first large independent developer of social games on Facebook (and thus a company whose fortune depends to a relatively high degree on Facebook’s product and policy directions) to be listed in public equity markets.

Thus, when that happens, the stakes will be higher for Facebook to detail how changes to its Platform features, monetization services, organic communication channels, and developer policies fit into its its vision for the long term success and growth of the Platform. If it doesn’t, the consequences will be increased volatility for not just developers and private investors, but now public investors as well.

Facebook’s latest Platform Update to the Developers Blog announced that starting September 22nd, apps will require the manage_pages permission to access the FQL page_admin table and the accounts endpoint that list a user’s Pages and apps. Developers were given their final reminder about the July 1st mandatory migration to Facebook Credits, and informed that new data regarding user feedback to apps would soon appear in app Insights.

Finally, in the previous Platform Update post, Facebook documented how videos can be uploaded to Pages, applications, Groups.

Starting 90 days from last Friday, both the FQL page_admin table and the graph.facebook.com/me/accounts endpoint will only be accessible to apps that have been granted the manage_pages permission. This will limit which apps can tell what apps and Pages belong to what admins, but also make this information more secure. Apps that depend on this data should seek permissions from users before the migration date, September 22nd, 2011.

As part of Facebook’s transition to the Graph API from the now deprecated REST API, videos can now be uploaded to Pages, applications, and Groups via the Graph API. Publishing to a Group requires the publish_stream permission, and developers must swap in a Group’s ID. Publishing to Pages or applications requires the corresponding access token attained through requesting the manage_pages permission.

Facebook has provided code examples, and notes that videos may take a few minutes to finish uploading and become visible.

Disabled App Appeals, Feedback Insights

Late last week Facebook changed its automatic application enforcement system to take negative user feedback more into account when choosing apps to disable. This led several developers that have received negative feedback to suddenly have their apps removed from the Platform. This has caused a stir in the developer community, with some saying they were treated unfairly because they weren’t given early warning, and aren’t provided with deep enough data about user feedback.

Developers can check the email address they’ve listed in the Developers app for a notice about whether their app was disabled or had features removed. If they believe they were disabled in error, they can use the Disabled App Appeal form to request their app be reinstated. If their appeal is granted, all their app’s content and users will come back.

In response to the situation, Facebook has announced that more user feedback data will soon be included in application Insights. Developers will be able to see data including the quantity of posts marked as spam and stream story hides. This will allow them to better test new features and monitor to see their impact on feedback. If a new communication feature causes a spike in negative feedback, they’ll know to remove this feature before being shut down by Facebook’s automatic enforcement system.