After the uprising from Facebook users about the new terms and conditions (which have reverted back to the old version in the meantime), Mark Zuckerberg and the Facebook team have had a sit down and they believe they have come up with an innovative approach to developing Term of Use for the social network.

According to a post on the Facebook blog, Zuckerberg said  “the conventional business practices around a Terms of Use document are just too restrictive” and hence the new developments.

Facebook now intends to put the documents in the hands of users, and allow them to collaborate on its development.

Where will this take Facebook, and our rights, in the future? Seems the cautious are now becoming believers again, which should give us all a little bit more hope.

A post by TechCrunch highlighted the possibility of having vanity URLs on Facebook in the future.

Vanity URLs, in short, are the customised URLs of your page/blog on another community platform, like Facebook. They point directly to your page and dont conform to the hosts generated path i.e. www.facebook.com/[your businessname] instead of the path assigned by Facebook.

Though Facebook is allowing vanity URLs they have been limited to either bands, the super famous or business partners.

“Unfortunately we are not currently able to approve requests for vanity URLs (web addresses). The only Pages that presently have vanity URLs are bands and businesses that partnered with us for the initial launch of this new product. We hope to make these URLs available for everyone to have on their individual Page(s) in the future. When this feature is available, we will provide instructions on how to obtain a vanity URL on this help page.”

 I hope to see this come about sooner rather than later. It will be great for business to “customise” their current pages as well as taking your Facebook page offline onto business cards, letterheads and other offline branded material.

Is it really that important? Consider having, for example, http://www.facebook.com/formfunction, it is compact therefore brandable as well as clear and understandable. Compare it to the actual link: http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/home.php?filter=pp. A lot less distinct. Vanity URLs also give ownership to the brand page. So to answer the question – yes, I think it is important, especially for your business and its online presence.

Besides, after the latest Facebook upgrade why isn’t it there? Twitter has it, Myspace has it and LinkedIn has it.

Lets hope Facebook plays catch-up and gives business the opportunity to stand loud and proud (and branded).

Have you commisioned a developer to build your Facebook application? Does this developer understand the difference between security in Facebook and normal web systems?

Session management is a critical part of any web system which requires authentication. We’ve noticed that a number of  Facebook applications are being developed incorrectly, using the standard way of handling sessions in PHP, and this approach will leave your applications wide open to intruders.

Sessions in PHP default to using a cookie to store the session ID, however with FBML (Facebook Markup Language), cookies are not possible. To fix this problem, the API session_key is used as the PHP session ID, like so:

session_id($facebook->api_client->session_key);
session_start();

Without the correct use of session management in your applications, you will be exposing them to security threats and this could lead to larger problems down the time.

Read about different types of Facebook applications..

[via: Wiki]