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Facebook Launches Developer API
andrewman327 writes "The popular college social networking site Facebook recently unveiled an API open to developers. Programmers can utilize data from profiles, friends, photos, and events. An early example is FaceBank, which allows students to keep track of how much money they have lent their friends. The appeal of this platform will be slightly limited, however, as both developers and users must be members of Facebook. Facebook is the 60th most popular website for American websurfers and recently allowed high school students and employees of certain companies to join."
I don't know why but the name Facebook just creeps me out. I always imagine a big scrap book full of peeled of faces. Maybe I need to see someone about that..
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
By releasing the API, people can add features to facebook without requiring any additional facebook developer resources.
Like the Piggy Bank. Facebook could have implemented this... or it could have let millions of adoring fans write it for them. There are a few ideas floating around the developer network. Imagine if Facebook had X ability. Well now it can be done.
Just like MySpace and Blogging... the people make the content. Look at all the great google maps api applications. Google spent 0 amount of time making those. The released the API and people wrote it for them.
Good question. There are a few valid uses, but from the look of it, it appears that the API's crippled such to prevent most of them.
After briefly glancing at the documentation, it looks like this is only good for pulling information from facebook, but not actually being able to make changes or add information.
Granted, this makes it a bit more secure and less prone to spam, but still.... an interface that would allow me to programatically upload photos or create events would be great.
Kudos to the facebook guys for making a social networking site that's actually usable.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
tomorrow who's gonna fuss
What Myspace needs to do is realise that it has more users, more information about them, less specifically linked, so thus it has more potential. They have the ideas (on the School forums they have mostly-unused bulletin boards for craigslist-esque classifieds) but without the implementation, they just look like amateurs.
That said, they also occasionally remove features.
A while back, they had a great feature: they let you download your friends' addresses and other contact information as VCard-format files, which you could import into your local addressbook.
This was brilliant. Frankly it was better than any LDAP-type or Active Directory system I'd used; and it meant that my local address book suddenly had stuff like postal addresses, birthdays, plus email addresses in it. I'd never had the time to hand-enter that stuff in the past, and Facebook was a one-stop directory for contact information. On my Mac, once I got the information from the Facebook export into Address Book, people's birthdays automatically got added to my calendar, too. It was just a really nice, integrated system. I expected that the next step would be to give some sort of an open API, so that you could connect directly rather than having to export as a file and import it on the client machine.
Instead, they killed the feature. Completely. It really ruined a lot of the usefulness of Facebook for me, because now if I want to use any of the information that's there, I have to retype it manually into my address book. I'm not sure what their motivation was for getting rid of it, if it was spam-related or if they wanted to try to discourage people from taking information out of the site, and then not having to come back to the site and view their ads as frequently, but I was pretty disappointed.
I'm hopeful that maybe with this API, they'll bring some of that usefulness back.
After all, what is a "social networking" site really, once you get past the buzzword-itis? It's really a very smart, well-organized, user-driven information directory (at least this is how most people use it). To be able to use something like your Facebook friends list as your Address Book when writing emails or anything else, would make a lot of sense.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Ummm... because ads are generally not annoying-enough to justify installing extra crap. I've become mostly desensitized to them anyways. But, these shady ones deserve to be pummeled just on principle.
There's only 1 ad on a facebook page, compared to the 10 billion on the horrible myspace pages, nevermind the ads that myspace morons put on their own pages themselves.
Facebook is actually usable, whereas myspace is probably the worst site on the internet.
Oh good... one more reason to return to the site more than the 22 times I do during the day already.
The two sites take a different approach to things. I like to say that Facebook is better when you already have friends, and are using it to foster closer relationships. Myspace is better when you're trying to make friends.
I'm a bit more wary of Facebook though, it will sell your data to the highest bidder, whereas Myspace has a slightly higher regard for its users privacy.
Bookfaced, at http://www.bookfaced.com/fb/, uses the API to map all your friend's hometowns in Google Maps. Handy if you're looking to plan a carpooled trip or something.
//TODO: Insert catchy phrase