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Facebook Quietly Offers Storage to Developers
Lucas123 writes "Facebook has quietly started offering beta testers access to the latest version of a new storage service, according to Computerworld's Brian Fonseca. The wiki does warn users that the page is still in development and that users should make sure that data used in testing the service is properly backed up. Nick O'Neill, creator of the blogsite AllFacebook.com, said it would be "revolutionary" if the service is free."
i really think this story is missing the point...this doesn't look like an API for file storage, i think it's just going to enable devs creating applications for facebook to store any info in db's on facebooks servers rather than their own. my guess is just that it's been taken out of context. facebook won't be offering file storage at all, because that's not what this API is for
I think that we have to differentiate between the kinds of data that we're talking about Facebook controlling here. Hopefully, we're not talking about credit card info, social security numbers, etc, but more likely how many times your "Pinky the pig" widget has been feed that day, by whom and how much he now weighs. Hopefully, none of these widgets/apps will be collecting sensitive personal information, and even though widgets/apps using storage will perhaps have to be approved by Facebook, hopefully no one is stupid enough to entrust these disparate widget/app developers with their data in the first place.
An additional threat is really to the widget/app developers who can now have "their" data taken away at any time, perhaps for any reason by Facebook. Perhaps Facebook will want to give exclusive and preferential privilege to a particular widget/app developer because of some behind-the-scenes deal and pretty much wipe the completion out at the flick of a switch. They could pick up a widget from where a "discontinued service left off" and the end user wouldn't even notice.
BTW, I don't have a myspace, facebook, etc account, and only imagining what might/could happen.
TFA doesn't really reflect what the new API is meant to do. Having done some work on Facebook applications, one of the major issues that tends to come up is the storage of user data. Previously, you would need to store any information you needed in your own database. For significantly popular applications, this presents a major load issue. With the new API, it looks like developing applications with a high level of persistent information should be simpler, and require less load on the applications server.
I'd also strongly suspect that Facebook would crack down hard on anyone trying to use this API to store large quantities of data.