Announcing facebook.stackoverflow.com

Without question, the greatest asset we have here at Stack Exchange is the members of our community, their collective knowledge, and their desire to help others. Similarly, there’s no greater feeling for us than when others recognize that strength and wonder how they can use it to help their users too — ultimately, it just…

Without question, the greatest asset we have here at Stack Exchange is the members of our community, their collective knowledge, and their desire to help others.  Similarly, there’s no greater feeling for us than when others recognize that strength and wonder how they can use it to help their users too — ultimately, it just helps make the internet a better place.

So when the largest social developer platform in the world came to us and said they wanted to partner with us, we were all ears.  And because of that partnership, we are proud to announce that facebook.stackoverflow.com is launching today as the new official developer support channel for all Facebook developers.

But facebook.SO isn’t just a sub-domain, it’s an entirely new feature set that we’ve been considering and working on for months.  Ever since launching, we’ve gotten requests to start dedicated communities for niche programming topics, but we’ve always been hesitant to do so for fear of balkanizing the great community we already have. So we came up with a solution that provides the best of both worlds.  We can now create a mini-site by selecting relevant tags (in this case, anything Facebook related) and grouping together just the content from those tags. When you visit a mini-site, you’ll see only the content from those tags.  Not only will you be able to see only questions related to Facebook, but the reputation on the user ranking pages will also only show reputation earned on questions tagged Facebook.

The key to this functionality is that you’re seeing a filtered view of Stack Overflow, much like if you set up a favorite tags view. That means that when you ask a question on Facebook.SO, you’re still getting access to the entire community of 750,000+ users, and any questions you answer there count toward your Stack Overflow reputation, too.

If you’re a Facebook developer who is already a Stack Overflow user, we’ve made it incredibly easy to get started.  In fact, you don’t have to do anything at all (though you do want to make sure your Facebook account is connected to your SO account — there’s instructions how on the Facebook Developer Blog).  If you’re a Facebook Developer who doesn’t already have a Stack Overflow account, just visit facebook.stackoverflow.com and click the Facebook “Log In” button on the right hand side. You’ll be up and running in about 10 seconds.

Enjoy!

If you want to learn even more about what you can do with Facebook and other new technologies, make sure to register for our upcoming Stack Overflow DevDays conference series, coming up this fall.