Facebook Blog, Applications and Developers Directory

Facebook made some minor changes to the homepage last night with one substantial change which is the removal of quick links to Facebook created applications (notes, videos and photos). Now, the status has been promoted to be the primary item within the homepage. This new update clearly marks a shift toward a more Twitter-like environment.

Additionally, statuses are no longer in the sidebar only in the news feed. The majority of the changes are extremely small but the promotion of statuses definitely emphasizes the importance of statuses. Soon enough we will see statuses as the default tab within the news feed. That would actually make a lot of sense considering Facebook’s less than efficient auto-filtering system in the feed.

I’ve noticed that viewing the unfiltered feed provides me with much more valuable information. I’ve spoken with a number of other people who have been dissatisfied with the quality of stories being displayed in the news feed. Have you had any issues with news feed content?

This evening, Facebook announced a new set of demographic targeting features that will enable developers to limit users that view specific content. Developers may limit viewership based on age and location. With these restrictions comes a policy update which enables alcoholic beverages to be promoted. As the blog post today states:

We plan to modify this policy to permit promotion of content around the sale of alcohol, provided that you specifically use the Demographic Restrictions feature to restrict your application or content to users of appropriate legal age.

There have already been a number of applications shut down for the promotion of alcohol and it is no secret that alcohol companies are desperate to get on to Facebook. Most likely because one of the largest demographics for the site is college students. Does that mean that Facebook is going to start alcohol promotions in the near future? I don’t see why not.

Alcohol companies spend billions on advertising, so I’d guess that we’ll see many more beer and liquor ads in the near future. Perhaps Facebook will start to feel like spring break! If you’d like more details on the demographic restrictions check out the wiki page.

Developers building on the Facebook Platform are well aware of Facebook’s increasing efforts to enforce its platform policies and reward applications acting in accordance with the platform ideals with benefits.

Today, the MySpace Developer Platform team clarified its process for developers who violate the the MDP Terms or Guidelines.

Specifically,

On first violation:

* In most instances,the application developer will receive a notice giving them 48 hours to fix the issue. If the problem is not fixed within that period of time, the application will be muted (muted applications may not send communication) for 48 hrs. If the application is still not fixed after 48 hours, it will be suspended. Should one company have an application in violation of policy once, and then do something with another application, that will be considered a second violation.

On second violation:

* The application will be muted immediately, then suspended after 48 hours.

On third violation:

* The application will be suspended immediately.

If a company continues to repeatedly violate our TOU/Guidelines, action may be taken against the company and/or all of their applications, which could include banning them from the platform.

Of course, MySpace said it reserves the right to skip steps for “major” violations. For more info, check out the policy section on the MySpace Developer Platform forums.

More social marketers seeking to engage their audiences on Facebook are turning to firms like Buddy Media and Context Optional to develop and promote applications that allow for rich interactions between Facebook users and their brands.

This week, the companies released several new applications that agencies should check out:
1. Buddy Media and Fox News

Buddy Media’s Fox News app allows users to visit the Fox News Page, customize the Fox News video player, and integrate it on their profile. “Supporters of Fox News will be able to carry their brand affinity off the Fan Page and onto their personal profile - increasing brand exposure and application engagement beyond the point of first contact,” says Buddy Media’s Greg Roth.

2. Context Optional, Ogilvy, and Kraft

Context Optional’s One Minute Mogul app is a social game that encourages users to try a new line of Oscar Meyer sandwiches through coupons. “It’s a very innovative approach tying online viral marketing to offline store purchases, and we’re excited to see how it goes,” says Context’s Kevin Barenblat.

3. Context Optional, Rapp Collins, and Travel Channel

Context Optional’s Kindap! app is a social game designed to drive traffic to the Travel Channel’s website. Users kidnap their friends to far off places, and in order to escape the hostage must answer a question (the answer for which can be found on TravelChannel.com). “The app includes sophisticated Flash and heavy graphics to meet Travel Channel’s branding guidelines and has seen significant growth since it launched a couple weeks ago,” says Barenblat.

While 10% of Facebook employees may have come from Google, the tide is now flowing in the opposite direction too. Ben Ling, who decided to leave Facebook this week, is headed back to Google to lead YouTube’s monetization efforts, Kara Swisher reports.

The move back to GOOG comes only 10 months after Ling left Google Checkout’s e-commerce platform group to run Platform product marketing for Facebook. YouTube’s former head of monetization, Saschi Shef, recently left Google to become chief revenue officer at KP-backed startup Cooliris.

Unlike the early Facebook platform, the MySpace platform has undergone very controlled growth, as access to various viral channels has been slowly rolled out to application developers. Most recently, MySpace released their long awaited limited application invites offering. Given that in this relatively controlled environment most applications have thus far experienced “organic” growth, the relative popularity of certain application categories thus far is likely indicative of the platform’s future.

We’ve compiled a breakdown of the most popular application categories to date by adding up the total install numbers from the top 10 applications in each of the 23 application categories. Some major applications (mostly games) are counted in multiple categories, and this approach does ignore the long-tail of the application gallery. But generally the results are a fair assessment of the MySpace Platform’s early growth.

Friendster, which has risen to become the largest social network in Asia after its precipitous fall in North America years ago, is today announcing support for OpenSocial 0.7 as part of the Friendster Developer Program.

The Friendster app platform actually launched in late 2007 - it was the second social network to launch a platform after Facebook. Since then, thousands of developers have joined the Friendster Developer Program and about 500 apps have been released on the Friendster platform. Friendster told us today that 10 million unique users have installed at least 1 application so far, and half a million apps are installed every day. Of those who have installed applications, the average is between 2-3 apps installed per person.

Friendster’s Jeff Roberto says that the company will continue to support existing APIs as it adds OpenSocial support. “We plan to support both. This is really an extension of the Friendster Developer Program to developers of OpenSocial applications, who should now be able to run their apps on Friendster out of the box. We’re the only place that app developers can reach 55 million unique users in Asia on a single social network. And we have very low overlap with other social networks.”

Friendster’s platform as an open revenue model, meaning developers are free to monetize their apps however they like. One unique aspect to monetizing on the Friendster platform is that ads on the profile page are permitted - unlike other social networks.

“Friendster’s launch is another major milestone in the adoption and deployment of OpenSocial throughout the social web and around the world. We’re particularly excited that OpenSocial is helping Friendster bring new social applications to users in Asia, and we look forward to seeing users embrace these apps,” said David Glazer, director of engineering at Google.

Roberto says that while the company is not ready to announce specific dates yet, Friendster does plan on supporting the OpenSocial 0.8 spec. OpenSocial 0.8 adds REST API support - like the Facebook Platform does

Facebook pushed a couple changes to the redesigned home page tonight that may be of interest to application developers:

1) Publisher shortcuts for Facebook-developed applications have been removed, and publishing status updates has been promoted.

The new design is reminiscent of the Twitter home page:

Previously, links to your own profile page with the Publisher selected for posting photos, videos, notes, and links were located here.

2) Status updates have been removed from the right rail, and application bookmarks have been promoted. Now, status updates are only accessible within the Top Stories feed or filtered Status Updates feed.

Old:

3) And finally, some UI elements have been cleaned up, which may satisfy picky designers.

Top Facebook application developer Slide has rebranded FunWall, the biggest application on the Facebook Platform by monthly reach, as “Slide FunSpace (formerly FunWall).” FunWall’s 21 million monthly active users should now notice the chance on their Facebook profile pages and bookmarks.

The move marks the first time Slide has included its company brand in the name of its Facebook applications. While all Slide applications are heavily branded within the canvas page, Slide’s other popular applications - Top Friends and SuperPoke - don’t include the company’s name in the app title.

The change in branding may be partially due to some of the changes in Facebook’s upcoming profile page redesign. The new “Wall” tab on the profile page allows for more types of rich media content in the Facebook Wall (a combination of Facebook’s old wall and feed concepts), which many have argued encroaches on third party “wall” applications.

The change also reflects how easy it is for application developers to rebrand their applications inside the Facebook world. One change to your developer settings page and voila! - your application’s name is updated to millions of users throughout Facebook instantly.

Facebook announced today that is has enabled two new Facebook Platform features that enable developers to restrict access to certain application content - or the entire application itself - from users fitting certain demographic profiles.

Demographic restrictions have been requested by two camps of developers:

1. Those who have licensed content or games only in certain geographic regions - like the US and Canada but not the rest of the world.
2. Those who want to limit access to certain application content or experiences to users of a certain age group - like under 18 or over 21.

Facebook’s new “Demographic Restrictions” APIs will enable developers to limit access to users according to any combination of age and location restrictions.

* The admin.setRestrictionInfo method allows developers to restrict access to the entire application.
* The fb:restricted-to FBML tag allows developers to restrict access to the included content.

So, how exactly is Facebook going about implementing these restrictions? Facebook says it will be using “a combination of what information a user has entered and verified on Facebook as well as IP targeting” for location. Furthermore, Facebook says that developers should not rely on Facebook to implement any restrictions developers are legally obligated to.

[Developers] must use this technology whenever Facebook policies require it… but you can and should consider implementing additional consent or confirmation in your application as appropriate. For example, if for legal reasons your application requires the user to affirm that they are of a certain age or are in a certain location, you should continue to solicit that explicit affirmation, and not regard the fact that the user passed through the Demographic Restrictions as equivalent.

Since the launch of the Facebook Platform, Facebook’s Platform Application Guidelines have expressly prohibited applications that promote the sale of alcohol:

I. Applications may not promote, or contain content (including any advertising content) referencing, facilitating, promoting or using, the following:

4. Sale of liquor, beer, wine, tobacco products, ammunition and/or firearms;

Today, Facebook announced that, with the launch of its Demographic Restrictions capability for application developers, that policy is changing.

Now, Facebook says it plans to allow application content that promotes the sale of alcohol, provided that developers “specifically use the Demographic Restrictions feature to restrict your application or content to users of appropriate legal age.”

Facebook is currently beta-testing the new Demographic Restrictions feature with a “very limited” set of companies, and the new policy should go into effect in September, barring any big hiccups in the beta test.

This is good news for applications like Booze Mail and Happy Hour, that allow users to send each other virtual drink gifts, as well as other application developers hoping to sell to beer, wine, and liquor brands.

Developers interested in talking with Facebook on any sensitive questions regarding alcohol policy can email developers-help@facebook.com.

Facebook today released a preview of version 2.0 of Facebook iPhone application. The upshot? Both the home page and profile page in Facebook for iPhone will look and feel a lot more similar to the redesigned Facebook home page and profile page.

Still not included in any of the Facebook for iPhone mocks are ads. With iPhone rapidly gaining share in the mobile web market, we wouldn’t be surprised to see Facebook include ads in its mobile products in the next year - particularly to take advantage of the iPhone’s GPS data. Mobile ad network AdMob is giving away $1 million to iPhone developers, so it’s clear that the market is developing quickly.

Home - The home page will have a full News Feed, along with access to filtered views of the News Feed, like Status Updates, Posted Items, and Events.

Although Facebook has increasingly provided more and more application analytics to developers over the last year, developers who require more insight into their users’ behavior must roll their own analytics toolkits or turn to third parties. We recently profiled top Facebook application analytics providers, and new startup Kontagent is emerging as one of the most powerful early products.

was originally an app company started by Albert Lai and Jeffrey Tseng. The company built such advanced internal analytics tools that they decided to turn themselves into an analytics company instead. Now, the company is helping developers understand their users, improve their products, and connect with advertisers. We’ll focus on the product here.

Kontagent offers 3 main features: cohort analysis, “virality” analysis, and A/B tracking.

• Cohort analysis allows developers to slice and dice users according to their install date, install source, app version, and demographic. This is a powerful way for developers to see which partners and campaigns are driving the most valuable adoption.
• Virality analysis allows developers to track performance of each viral channel overall, and each message template sent through that channel. Specifically, Kontagent tracks invites sent per user, invite/notification conversion rates, and invite response delay.
• A/B testing allows developers to compare acceptance rates, outbound invite events, accepted invites, and response delay across message templates.is an important part of optimizing the performance of each of your communication channels.

In terms of technical setup, Kontagent provides a wrapper for the Facebook client library, that calls Kontagent methods when certain Facebook API methods are called. While Kontagent only supports Facebook apps at the moment, it plans on adding support for MySpace applications in the future.

Overall, Kontagent looks like a solid product, especially for those developers that don’t have the resources to build their own product analytics tools. For now, Kontagent is free for developers, but it does plan on charging for premium features in the future.

For further reference, see the company’s own feature comparison sheet:

Forrester’s Jeremiah Owyang recently caught up with Facebook’s Director of Monetization Tim Kendall, who spoke about the different ways Facebook is packaging its advertising products for big brands. Tim says that Facebook is focusing on 3 different types of “engagement” ads:

1) Comment Style Ad: Members can now leave comments on these advertisements, much like wall posts. Brands that are focused on entertainment, new product rollouts, autos and apparel are well suited. The ad can show up to 4 comments per object, and the activity spreads to the users newsfeed.

2) Virtual Gifts Style Ad: Brands can now create virtual items that users can share, spread to each other. This wildly popular behavior within applications and Facebook is suitable for consumer products, entertainment, and some media.

3) Fan Style Ad: A play off the Facebook pages, users with a persona affinity for a product (like Apple) can become a fan, triggering a notification to their network, and could then tie on social ads. Will work great for established brands, like guitar hero, passion products, luxury products, or any brand with a rabid customer base.

Tim’s words reflect Facebook’s plans to find ways to monetize user engagement without sending the user outside Facebook. Because Facebook controls the social graph and the distribution channels of social information, Facebook can offer a lot of value to brands hoping to increase their integration with the social graph and prominance within the distribution channels (feeds).

Facebook’s goals are generally true of anyone trying to monetize social media these days: gone are the days when brands buy clicks to micro-sites. Here are the days of viral endorsements, virtual gifts, and comments on your brand made more visible to friends.

Related Inside Facebook Resources:

Two weeks after hi5 announced support for OpenSocial 0.8 in its developer sandbox, the MySpace Developer Platform team today announced in its platform Release Notes that support for OpenSocial 0.8 apps on the MySpace platform is “coming soon.” What that means exactly date-wise remain to be seen, as MySpace has generally taken the “take things slow and release later” approach on most things platform related so far.

OpenSocial 0.8 is important for developers because it’s the first time OpenSocial has included a spec for building apps using REST APIs, decreasing the need for developers to use and maintain complex JavaScript.

Developers building on the Facebook Platform are well aware of Facebook’s increasing efforts to enforce its platform policies and reward applications acting in accordance with the platform ideals with benefits.

Today, the MySpace Developer Platform team clarified its process for developers who violate the the MDP Terms or Guidelines.

Specifically,

On first violation:

* In most instances,the application developer will receive a notice giving them 48 hours to fix the issue. If the problem is not fixed within that period of time, the application will be muted (muted applications may not send communication) for 48 hrs. If the application is still not fixed after 48 hours, it will be suspended. Should one company have an application in violation of policy once, and then do something with another application, that will be considered a second violation.

On second violation:

* The application will be muted immediately, then suspended after 48 hours.

On third violation:

* The application will be suspended immediately.

If a company continues to repeatedly violate our TOU/Guidelines, action may be taken against the company and/or all of their applications, which could include banning them from the platform.

Of course, MySpace said it reserves the right to skip steps for “major” violations. For more info, check out the policy section on the MySpace Developer Platform forums.

More social marketers seeking to engage their audiences on Facebook are turning to firms like Buddy Media and Context Optional to develop and promote applications that allow for rich interactions between Facebook users and their brands.

This week, the companies released several new applications that agencies should check out:

1. Buddy Media and Fox News

Buddy Media’s Fox News app allows users to visit the Fox News Page, customize the Fox News video player, and integrate it on their profile. “Supporters of Fox News will be able to carry their brand affinity off the Fan Page and onto their personal profile - increasing brand exposure and application engagement beyond the point of first contact,” says Buddy Media’s Greg Roth.

2. Context Optional, Ogilvy, and Kraft

Context Optional’s One Minute Mogul app is a social game that encourages users to try a new line of Oscar Meyer sandwiches through coupons. “It’s a very innovative approach tying online viral marketing to offline store purchases, and we’re excited to see how it goes,” says Context’s Kevin Barenblat.

3. Context Optional, Rapp Collins, and Travel Channel

Context Optional’s Kindap! app is a social game designed to drive traffic to the Travel Channel’s website. Users kidnap their friends to far off places, and in order to escape the hostage must answer a question (the answer for which can be found on TravelChannel.com). “The app includes sophisticated Flash and heavy graphics to meet Travel Channel’s branding guidelines and has seen significant growth since it launched a couple weeks ago,” says Barenblat.

Jeremiah Owyang posted about a new type of advertisement that Tim Kendall, Director of Monetization told him about. Yesterday we were first to post about the new types of advertisements that Facebook will be releasing but Jeremiah Owyang provided more details today on what those ads will involve. Apparently the ads will encourage “members to interact with the ads by leaving comments, sharing virtual gifts, or becoming fans.”

Much of this doesn’t actually sound new. The commenting feature that Jeremiah describes sounds eerily familiar to the Facebook video ads that we broke the news about. One thing that currently doesn’t have commenting is sponsored news feed stories, so perhaps that will be an addition to this new feature. According to Jeremiah there will be three types of advertisements:

* Comment Style Ad - Users can post comments on the advertisements. The only thing new here from the sound of it is the ability to comment on news feed stories.
* Virtual Gifts Style Ad - Similar to the Indiana Jones gift campaign that was already run on Facebook, brands will be able to create virtual goods.
* Fan Style Ad - A way to become a fan of products you enjoy. Not entirely sure how this differs from Facebook fan pages but ok!

Ultimately many of these changes don’t sound very new and instead sound like a rebranding of something that already exist. The new commenting feature is really the added value. As Jeremiah Owyang points out, Facebook now has a bunch of different offerings to advertisers and marketers. Now all that needs to be done is a more thorough education for those advertisers.

Over the past few days I’ve been writing about the shift of social networks from technology companies to media companies at the Social Times. If you haven’t been paying attention, you might want to check out a post on Techcrunch today in which Mike Arrington argues that Facebook’s lack of a centrally controlled music service is damaging its domestic growth.

Last year I suggested that Facebook is supposed to be launching a music service after a source told me that he had spoken with somebody that interviewed for a position to run a music service. Mike Arrington says that it’s now clear that Facebook is sticking with iLike as its music partner. That was emphasized when iLike was announced as a launching member of Facebook’s Great Apps program.

Hadi discussed this during an interview with the Social Times. For Facebook to launch their own competing music service would be a bad political move but as Mike Arrington suggests, “Music is such a big category that is so completely dominated by MySpace, that it seems like they should have their overall music strategy under their direct control.”

So is music key to Facebook’s domestic growth? It’s clear that music is definitely one way to attract outside visitors. Millions of bands and artists use MySpace as their central location for promoting their work and that means millions of visitors being promoted to the site. Is there another channel that Facebook can target that has the same level of self-promoting activities?

Not that I know of. Is there any other group that you think Facebook should be targeting?

There’s a pretty well known secret among top Facebook application developers: one developer is generating over $1 million a month. Who is that developer exactly? Well, most people won’t talk about it and after some prodding around we’ve narrowed down the suspects. We aren’t going to post them though because ultimately it doesn’t matter who the individual is. All that matters is that a top application that is used for entertainment purposes is generating over $1 million a month.
Facebook Apps As a Business

While it still doesn’t qualify the company as a large business, it does emphasize the potential for applications in this space. As an individual developer or a small team of developers, $1 million a month is pretty damn good and I’m sure a large portion of that is going straight to the bank. Who’s responsible for generating this revenue?

Well there is already multiple ad networks that are generating revenue for their developers, but some of them are going so far as to speak out about how much money is being generated. myOfferpal (who is also a sponsor of and participant in our Social Ad Summit) has said that developers are generating around $75 per 1,000 active daily users on average and $150-$200 for more engaging applications.
How to Generate the Big Bucks

So are you looking to become the next Facebook application millionaire? Good luck! Generating $1 million a month is pretty challenging in the current environment but if you can come up with a creative application, you may have a chance. (fluff)Friends users for instance, are so passionate about the application, that some of them went so far as to participate in a (fluff)Friends video contest. Below are a couple of the top videos.

This application and a few others like Friends For Sale, Mob Wars and Owned, are all highly engaging applications. Each of them continues to attract users months after they were launched and the applications also continue to evolve. If you are looking to build up your revenue base, then you might want to mimic many of the strategies employed by these companies.

Have you hears of any other interesting rumors about application revenue being generated?

Tim Kendall, Facebook’s Director of Monetization spoke at an app developer Meetup at AOL Mountain View. All Facebook covered the Social Ads panel and got a chance to catch up with Tim afterwards.

Tim Kendall

Tim’s team incubated Facebook Social Ads, and he oversees product development and product marketing for social advertsing on the Facebook platform.

Facebook Social Ads

Social advertising is a huge opportunity for Facebook and app developers. Facebook gives advertisers unprecedented reach, however, the platform is dominated by expressions of social intent - more so than commercial intent.

Facebook Social Ads is developing ways to segue users’ activities to more commercial actions, in a way that fits with the overall user experience of the platform. App developers are going to be able to participate, by having their applications accelerated by Facebook in partnership with paying advertisers.

Social advertising on Facebook is clearly experiencing rapid innovation and evolving dramatically.

Facebook Social Ads - Early Iterations:

Initially, the Social Ads program focused on leveraging the social graph to increase interest in an advertiser’s message. This increases performance relative to an advertisement that does not take advantage of knowledge of friend connections and information about those friends.

A classic example would be a campaign to promote a move that leveraged and communicated information about which of your friends watched or enjoyed a particular movie trailer.

Facebook Social Ads - Next Generation:

In the next 6-12 months, Facebook is developing the ability for advertisers to throttle usage and engagement in areas they care about. Marketers will be able to pay to accelerate usage they find valuabel, to dial up and down actions that people take on applications, as part of the Social Ads program. For instance, News Feed uses an algorthm to communicate a users actions to the friends who would find it most interesting. Marketers will be able to pay for increased or enhanced distribution above and beyond what News Feed already provides.

An example would be purchasing a ticket to a concert. Usually, a small subset of your friends would receive a notification of this action, however, in the future Cheryl Crow or Ticketmaster could pay fo r this to be distributed to your full friend group.

Summary

Tim and Facebook are clearly innovating rapidly in the Social Ads space, after defining the category initially. Facebook is exploring ways to make it completely transparent which actions are commercially accelerated on the platform, essentially in similar way to which Google color codes sponsored search links above its organic search results. Additionally, Facebook is focusing on how App Developers will be helped by this new form of monetization for their applications. Facebook will help app developers accelerate the distribution of their applications drive more usage with Facebook’s next generation of social advertising tools.

Will everyone accept how Facebook Social Ads affects the user experience (UX)?

New social ad network AdParlor started four months ago with one purpose in mind: to help developers of applications on Facebook and other social networks monetize their apps better. Today, the company has hit an important milestone in its growth: it’s now serving 1 million “quality” impressions daily.

How has AdParlor grown? The platform offers straight-forward demographic targeting capabilities, and allows both developers and advertisers to “tag” their apps and ads. CEO Hussein Fazal says that this matching technology helps AdParlor deliver click-through rates that are “double the industry standard 0.04%.”

“A lot of bigger advertisers are worried about where their ad will appear – which applications their ad may be associated with,” says Fazal. “Our tagging technique can be used using a loose match or an exact match – meaning that large advertisers can control exactly what type of applications their ad appears on.”

Advertisers can but on a CPM, CPC, or CPA basis. Currently, AdParlor publicly offers $1 CPM and $0.14 CPC to advertisers, and $0.65 CPM and $0.10 CPC to publishers. Five different ad units are available.

So far, while AdParlor is working with several agencies, many of AdParlor’s early advertisers are actually other application developers. While the eCPM rates on CPI/CPA ads have proven to perform well in the short term, it will be important for AdParlor to broaden its advertiser base to keep its eCPM rates up in the long term. Fazal says the company only currently offers CPA advertising to other app developers on the same platform - not to external sites.

Two weeks after Facebook launched News Feed filters for status updates, photos, and posted items, Facebook tonight launched new custom News Feed filters for individual applications and friend lists. The new filters are available under the “More Filters” drop-down on the top of the News Feed:

The new application-specific News Feed filters allow users to only show News Feed stories generated by a certain application. For example, here’s what my News Feed filtered by the Causes app looks like:

Friend-list News Feed filters work in much the same way, allowing users to only show feed stories from friends in a given friend list.

Facebook also turned on the “All Stories” News Feed tab tonight that allows users to view a full log of all their friends’ activity.

Overall, central to Facebook’s strategy in the coming years is owning the Feed data and providing a robust Feed experience. All user activity, from engagement with core Facebook services to Platform applications to Connect-enabled websites in the coming months, will flow through Facebook’s News Feed aggregation, selection, and distribution service. I expect Facebook to continue investing in News Feed infrastructure and consumption features to create an even more engaging experience.

In an effort to allow applications to more tightly integrate with the Facebook Events system, Facebook today launched new APIs that allow applications to create and manage Facebook Events from within the application.

Many applications like Party Buzz already add value to the Facebook Events system by aggregating what events your friends will be attending. The new APIs will enable apps to manage those events directly. Facebook writes,

For applications that already have events associated with them, like concert or class applications, now you can easily create and manage events that appear on Facebook, and your users can easily RSVP to these events from within the application. Stories about these events appear in the News Feeds of the friends of the attendee, and the person attending can invite more friends after RSVPing. In this case, you won’t need an active session to create events, since they’re associated with the application, and not the user. However, you’ll still need an extended permission and active session so a user can RSVP to these events.

Details on the API are available in the Developers Wiki.