Adding the Developer Application

Once you have an account and have set up a server environment, the next step is to add Facebook’s Developer application. Go to http://www.facebook.com/developers, and install the application.

Figure shows the screen that users are presented with when installing a new application. The check boxes allow certain functionality to be performed by the application, and they give users the ability to turn certain aspects of the application on and off. Once you have read the platform application’s terms of use, just click the Add Developer button to install the Developer application.
Once you’ve installed Developer, you are directed to a Facebook application that helps you manage the applications you are developing, including the most recent entries on the discussion board, news about the Facebook platform, links to your application management interface, and information on the status of the platform.

It’s important to keep up-to-date with the platform status because Facebook is adding information about new tags, changes to the terms of service (typically clarifying hazy areas), systemwide outages, and, perhaps most important, platform changes that have the potential to break your application. Like with most things in Facebook, you can subscribe to an RSS feed to help you keep up-to-date with these changes (http://www.facebook.com/feeds/api_messages.php).