Test yourself on Facebook

Until recently building a Facebook application meant either having to use your own real account, which could cause friction with friends who get with invites for your application in development or having to create a test account that would likely get banned and force you to start over. As the Facebook Wiki notes:

Facebook’s Terms of Service require that all accounts be linked to your real identity, so its not allowed to make fake accounts to test things with. The status quo is the following cycle: developers make test accounts, developers test with those accounts for a little while, our Customer Support team comes across those test accounts and identifies them as fake and disables them, developers are annoyed and frustrated, developers make more test accounts. This is pretty bad.

No longer – in a little-ballyhooed announcement, Facebook recently opened up the ability to create test accounts that would live in a quarantined zone, free from fear of banning. More below the fold…

From the Facebook developers’ blog (emphasis in original):

You can now make officially sanctioned test accounts

[...]

To make a test account, register on Facebook as you normally would. Then, when logged in to the test account, go to this URL:
http://www.facebook.com/developers/become_test_account.php

A few important things to note:

• Test accounts won’t be able to see real Facebook users and vice versa. You can make an existing account a test account, but if that account is friends with a real account, each user will disappear from the other’s list of friends.
• Our customer support team won’t disable test accounts for being fake, but test accounts may be disabled for violating any other reason that a real account would be disabled.
• Only real accounts may be listed as application owners. In other words, you may not list a test account as the developer of an app.

This should hopefully have the combined effect of making application development easier and letting developers’ friends off the hook for guinea pig duty. Of course, you’ll still have to think of a clever pseudonym for your test secret identity – even test accounts live under the auspices of Facebook’s suspicious name policy which doesn’t allow anyone with "test" in their name to sign up.

It’s also rather painstaking to see what the effect of an application would be on large networks – if you and three or four friends are playing a game like Scrabulous, it can chew up some serious feed space, which frequent readers know I place at a premium, and which I wish more developers would consider when building their apps.

In any case, if you’re building a test application, set up a test account today – not only will you be more secure in knowing the account you’re building it on won’t be banned, but your friends will thank you for it.

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