No more 24 hour rule!
One of the more interesting announcements coming out of f8 was the relaxation on the prohibition of cacheing data for more than 24 hours. Now I’ve always thought that this prohibition came from the privacy world – don’t save people’s information because it isn’t yours. Turns out, it isn’t a privacy thing at all – it’s really a user experience issue. The problem with holding on to people’s data is what happens if it changes? If you store the data and rely on it being current, things will fall apart when the user changes it several weeks from when you stored it. However, if you can only hold onto it for 24 hours, the chances of something going wrong go down dramatically.
These concerns go away now because of the new service that allows developers to register with Facebook to be notified when a user’s information changes. This will allow any cached data to be updated without any concerns of getting out of whack. This can dramatically simplify writing applications, and it was one new feature that seems to be universally embraced by developers.
And how does this affect FriendRunner? The FriendRunner profiler features that allow developers to see what APIs get called during the execution of their application become more important. There is now no excuse at all to call the same API with the same data, since the result may be cached, FriendRunner can help you find these types of problems, and identify places where you can optimize your code.
Tags: Facebook APIs
April 22, 2010 11:57 am 
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