This week’s Facebook Developer Garage was special. It was the first “Roadmap Edition,” where Mark Zuckerberg (Founder and CEO) and Ethan Beard (Director of Facebook Developer Network) took an unprecedented step in terms of laying out Facebook’s near future plans upcoming changes to the platform. This is great for developers because since we’ve wrapped our heads around the platform, we’ve been always asking what’s next. It’s also helpful for businesses like Inigral, in order to be able to anticipate what implications these upcoming changes will have on our application, and how they effect our clients. Here’s a high-level overview of what happened during the 2-hr presentation.

Key Takeaways from the event

• The roadmap covers the next 3-6 months of development.
• Facebook wants to be more transparent with it’s developers.
• No major announcements were made.
• All mockups, no final products were shown.

Highlights

The news stream is the best location for broadcast, one-to-many applications. Nothing’s changing about the stream. It will continue to grow.

User-to-user communication

There is lots of user-to-user communication. Too much, in the form of  notifications, requests, and invites. Users dont know where to go to find messages from their friends. They will be consolidating all of these in the inbox, because users need to know where things are from their friends. In other words, notifications will be gone. Requests and invites can be found in your Facebook inbox

They will be spending time enhancing the multi-friend selector, through filtering and sorting. For instance, choosing friends within a certain app, etc…

Facebook is always in the middle of any communications channel. No way to communicate directly to the users. Developers are always trying to figure out who owns this customer: Facebook or the developer.

Email addresses are now given to developers with the user’s permission. **HUGE**

Discovery and engagement

Users struggle to find navigation. We know where it is, but the new navigation will all be on the left side of the homepage, and adding counters. Counters allow devs to signal to users, if they have actions inside of the app. Devs have real control in the app, and FB’s goal is for the actions to be real world, and not fake. The users can now do these actions inside of the app.

They are making high level navigations for users called dashboards. There will be one for applications and one for games. These will be dedicated spaces for all of a users gaming (or application) activity on Facebook. The users will no longer forget where they were in the game, or leave a game without having a place to come back. In the same vain, they will possibly add leaderboards, leading to discovery of new games, and re-engagement with existing games.

User interface updates

The canvas page. The canvas page belongs to the developers. The top navigation on the canvas page will help users understand that it belongs to Inigral, and gives us an opportunity to brand ourselves. Facebook wants us to build long term successful businesses, and this is a step in that direction.

New Products and Programs

Facebook has spent a lot of time in new products. There’s a whole new site with new documentation and user guides to foster new collaborations.

They will be publishing all of this on a public-facing roadmap, so that we can see where they are investing their resources, and give us insight into the their plans.

The Platform’s live status will be there to see where issues are, whether it’s on Facebook’s side, or our side. FB is publishing what the technical health is on the platform, a prioritized bug list, and other things to building a more stable platform.

Platform Policies

The platform policies have grown over the past 2 years,  incrementally to address issues that weren’t originally thought about. There’s over 14 pages of platform policy. FB is creating an easy to understand policy set. that will be published today. Now it’s only 3 pages. In the back of the policies, there will be screenshots of best practices and violations. This section will be consistently updated.

Enforcement

The quality of apps that have gone through verification is significantly higher than those that arent. But they are ending the verification program as a stand alone. Proactively checking apps that are above a non-trivial size, in order to check them and screen them in that way.

Analytics

Developers are asking to have more insight into what’s happening inside of their apps, the various integration points, and how the various communications channels like notifications, invites, and requests will play a role. With the new analytics offering, Facebook is allowing developers to  to take the data and mash it up into ways that are relevant to their companies and applications.

Open Graph API

The Open Graph API allows any page on the web to have the same features as a fan page within facebook. It will show up anywhere. The page will post info into that person’s news feed. This allows developers to help users connect with what’s most important to them. This was the most important feature to me, because it serves as an extension of Facebook connect, that allows people to bring Facebook’s tools into their own site. This doesn’t change the fact that the majority of college students spend their online time on Facebook.com. But it does offer opportunities for higher ed institutions to have an web strategy that collaborates more with Facebook in mind, as their target audiences are already there.

These are only a few of the changes that will be rolled out on Facebook’s platform over the next six months. As we digest all of the implications of these changes, we will be discussing with our partner community what those implications mean for our applications. But after talking with several members of the team there, we’re confident that these changes will have positive effect on Schools on Facebook as we continue to serve the unique needs of higher education. You can view the other photos from the event here.