A couple of hours ago, Facebook announced a fairly heavy breaking change to its Graph API, that has the potential to kill Facebook integration for many websites and mobile apps.
The Graph API has become the primary means for third party sites and services, to access data on Facebook. For example, if you visit http://graph.facebook.com/bomega/feed you get a nice JSON representation of everything our very own Boris has posted to his News Feed.
Under the hood, many apps and Facebook SDKs grab your data by sending these sort of requests to Facebook’s Graph API.
Starting June 3rd, the above demoed easy access will no longer work.
Instead, developers have to add an access token to the call, making it potentially more secure. However, getting an access token requires the two step authentication that you may have seen a number of times when services asked for permission to post on your behalf.
As this severely alters the current interaction flow, chances are, many apps will need an upgrade over the next couple of weeks.
Given the potential impact, it’s a little bit odd to see this as almost a one-liner buried down somewhere on Facebook’s developer site.
Get the TNW newsletter
Get the most important tech news in your inbox each week.