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."

Comments

Re:Free Content

[0100010001010011]

Agreed.

I in no way meant a jab at the FB developers. But one team can only do so much. I've been on facebook since the beginning. Since then features show up and 'just work.' I remember looking at the JS before they added the "In a relationship with" thing. I was like "wow... I wonder what they're going to do with this." Sometimes I find a feature and brag about it to my friends only to find out that it was added months ago.

Facebook trumps MySpace in more than the API arena. It's the type of website that I want complete conformity with. I don't want to dig through a black on dark gray color scheme while the latest top 40 is blaring in my speakers if I'm trying to find a friend's e-mail address. It has a googleish simplicity about it. Blue on blue color scheme with a white background.

And for all the people screaming 'think of the children' with facebook. My profile is set up as the most restrictive. I do not show up in searches (even for my direct full name). I do not show up as friends of other people. My 'wall' messages that I leave on other peoples walls don't even show up to people that aren't my friends. Photos tagged of me don't show up to anyone that isn't my friend, even if it's not my album. Facebook CAN be secure, it's just no one takes the time.

Too bad they killed VCard Export

[Kadin2048]

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.