Facebook Provides Developers with Platform Alerts

Right before the Thanksgiving holiday, in an effort to make the Facebook platform more responsive and dependable for developers, Facebook announced Developer Alerts. Developer alerts are a way for Facebook platform developers to receive critical information about their apps via email or Facebook notification.

Facebook Developer Alerts provide the following for Facebook app administrators:

• Breaking Changes - If your app is using functionality that FB is changing or removing, you will be sent an alert at least 90 days before the change goes into effect
• App Status Changes - If you have submitted Open Graph actions or created an app detail page for App Center, FB will use Developer Alerts to notify you when the status of your submission changes
• Policy Violations and Enforcement - If your app doesn’t adhere to FB Platform Policies you will be notified through these alerts

Facebook Developer Alerts are more than notifications, it is an issue management system which will allow multiple developers on a project to known when action is required or things have been resolved.

It seems like a great approach to improving communications between API platforms and its API application developers. I think I will add platform alerts as an official API building block, and recommend it as something API should consider when developing their platform.

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