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September 26, 2008

Facebook Syndication Improvements - Adding To Facebook Just Two Clicks Away!

We are very excited with our latest platform update which made significant improvements to our syndication support.  This release improved the "Copy to Facebook" workflow considerably. Adding a widget to your Facebook profile is now only two clicks away. We also included an  "Add to profile" button to allow you to add the widget to your profile page or your boxes tab in just one step. 

With this release, we have also have made it possible for users to access the syndication panel for smaller widgets (badges), regardless of their copy destination.

We also have made the subject line in the Send To A Friend syndication option editable.
 
In addition to these significant improvements, we've also made the following changes/fixes to the platform:

  • Copying widgets to Live.com has been restored. However, we are still investigating an issue with posting a widget to the Live.com Gallery.
  • We have increased the character limits to 128 characters for the title field that can be found within our Content Management System (CMS) available via the dashboard.  We also added error messaging for exceeding the character limit.

As always, your feedback is always welcome

September 03, 2008

Default Apps Available for Bebo & Facebook

This latest release had a focus on creating default applications for both Bebo and Facebook.  This means that any widget published to our platform will automatically be available as both a Bebo and Facebook application - without any additional configuration on your part.  In actuality, the newly created widget would be added to our default applications, allowing users to engage with the widget alongside other widgets that are part of our default application.  For apps that need their own identity or need to leverage social features, you still have the ability to spend a little more time and configure Bebo and/or Facebook to support your newly created widget.

We've added the ability to more effectively "share" Facebook applications with other users.  If you are accessing an application, you can click "share" which will take you to the canvas page and make it possible for you to select friends that you want to share the application with.  This helps to drive the viral effect of the applications.

For additional flexibility within the custom "send to friend" template, we've added the ability to parse out individual FlashVar values so that they can be printed in the email or used to generate URLs.  In addition, the image URL now displays the image of the widget with it's FlashVars set - allowing you to send a very specific representation of the actual widgets rather than the default screenshot.

We've also implemented to backend changes which will improve performance.  The first separates our tracking calls from the calculation that's done for our reports.  This allows each system to function much more fluidly. The second change leverages our CDN to cache our proxy.api calls, ensuring that the response time is faster and we have less load on our servers.