Facebook’s big changes to the platform — key takeaways

Facebook did go through with the big top-down overhaul we reported on earlier. This could have significant implications for the way top-performing games attract new users through the system. (If you want the full live-blogged version, it’s here.)

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• Facebook is releasing an open graph API that can turn regular pages into Facebook Fan Pages. They can appear in a user’s profile and publish into their stream.
• Notifications are going away.
• Requests (for example, to join games) are being shuffled into the inbox.
• The boxes tab on a user’s profile is going away.
• It sounds like Facebook is going to more aggressively police applications that don’t comply with the company’s policies. They’re getting rid of the Verified Application Program, which gives apps a special certification if it meets special standards, as a standalone program. Instead, they’ll be applying those standards to all games and randomly checking ones of a certain user size for compliance.
• There will be a new applications dashboard and a games dashboard. The dashboards will have ‘counters’ that show when it’s time to take an action inside a game.
• There will be a new status page showing how the Facebook platform is performing (and whether there are problems that might bog down apps).
• Applications will have to get direct access to users’ e-mail addresses instead of relying on Facebook as an intermediary.
• Facebook is building a new Developers Web site at (http://developers.facebook.com) with a product roadmap.