Past actions and activity log
‘Past actions’ can be used in the time-line to post an action taken by a user more than three days ago. Such actions do not generate a news feed, and rather, are just tagged at that point in time, and can be visible in the activity log. These ‘past actions’ can thus be used by setting the start time for the application, whether it is the developers, testers or statistical analysts who need to retrieve data related to insights. Each of these has varied access to the application, in a differing manner. While developers can also change the settings related to the application, the tester can only access and use an application in the sand-boxed mode. You can even set up a test user account that can be used for testing purposes, from this section.
Apart from this, the new insights data tracking provides impressive visualisation tools for easy data tracking of new installs, sharing, performance, open graph activity, permission patterns, etc. This is something that is very valuable for future development and feedback, as to what the users want from your application, and what the social trends really are.
In conclusion, Facebook is a platform that has grown exponentially, and has become a hub of social Web development. There is probably no other platform that can provide such flexibility and such a wide array of tools to enable developers to build such new and innovative applications. One thing is clear —the future of the Web is definitely going to be more and more social, and Facebook has just proved it.