Tonight’s announcement by Facebook was a huge milestone for the company. Developers have been calling for a more open platform and it looks like Facebook has finally decided to give it to them. Included in the updates is not only an open status API which I claimed would potentially kill Twitter, but also shared links which means we will soon see the rise of Facebook news aggregators.
Granted, we don’t have limitless access to shared links, but I think aggregation will really be the key thing resulting from these new features. Through the power of Facebook Connect, companies can also rely completely on Facebook for hosting videos, photos, status updates, news articles, and more. Additionally, this new open layer will allow Facebook Connect communities as well as communities within the platform to create their own content aggregators.
Want to know what all users from within the AllFacebook community are sharing or linking within their status? We can now tell you a lot more about that thanks to the updated API.
It also appears that status update comments will also be visible via the API but I haven’t seen this implemented yet. If you are a developer or business owner that’s leveraged the Facebook API, you can now create interesting community tools. One example would be “What Our Community is Saying”, with a streaming list of the most recent status updates by the users.
Still Not Completely Opened
While all of these changes are warmly welcomed by the developer community, there are still a lot of things that are not provided by the platform. For instance, there is no API call for Videos.get. Right now all you can do is upload videos but not view them. Also, there are limitations on what shared links your application has access to.
Rather than searching through all of the shared links on Facebook, developers are limited to viewing those links that users have posted through their application. Facebook still has a long way to go though. For the time being, statuses appear to be the most open feature. There are plenty of features now available though for people to build robust applications built on statuses.
Will this “more open” Facebook platform result in a new wave of applications? Probably, but I think there are still a lot of things that need to opened on the platform. My guess is that we’ll see a large number of status feed applications build and while other apps will be built, any Twitter-like applications will receive the most amount of buzz.
Conclusion
There are a lot more opportunities to develop interesting applications with access to new forms of content on the Facebook platform. While Facebook hasn’t completely opened up access to the limitless amount of content passing through the Facebook platform, tonight’s changes were a huge step in the right direction.
The largest change is the open status API which is something that I began calling for a little over one month ago. If you build any interesting applications using the new Facebook API features please reach out to us and let us know so we can post about it!
![[Inside Social Apps 2012]](http://www.allfacebook.com/wordpress/wp-content/themes/allfacebook2/images/ISA2012_336x100_F_RegisterNow.gif)
![[AllFacebook Stats: Facebook Analytics for Your Business]](http://www.allfacebook.com/wordpress/wp-content/themes/allfacebook2/images/stpro_allfacebookstats.gif)
![[How can Facebook change your business?]](http://www.allfacebook.com/wordpress/wp-content/themes/allfacebook2/images/FMB_A_MAY2011_336x100_F.gif)
It can only get better. Facebook is such a disaster from a usability standpoint. Finding responses to my comments/updates/posts/notes. Each seems to be hidden somewhere else in the mess.
If someone coordinates it with twitter-like ease, then we're talking…
I like a single page with three columns of three streams: status updates (with comments), pictures/videos, posts and notes.
Comment by Phil — February 6, 2009 @ 7:41 pm
Facebook Connect is a mess. How do people keep track of their comments? BackType? Unacceptable and unintuitive. Like I said in the other post, Facebook needs to clean up some of the existing clustermesses before moving towards innovation. Seriously, what happened to Facebook Apps? Not only does the API break everything when there is a change, after the re-design, app revenue went downhill. WAY down hill. http://adonomics.com/about/2252801962 Is the same thing going to happen again?
Comment by Mona Nomura — February 6, 2009 @ 10:02 pm
I'm still not convinced an open status API will potentially kill Twitter. Facebook fails on everything Twitter is – it is a cumbersome system that is good at connecting friends who want to share a vast amount of data through a spectrum of applications. Twitter does one thing: simple messaging. It's a bit like saying cellphone text messaging could be potentially killed by email. Digital communications are getting more basic, not more complex. Of course, we don't know which direction Facebook apps will go in, but I don't see how Twitter can be threatened.
Also, as Mona said, I'm deeply disappointed in Facebook Connect. What's it supposed to do? The feedback I've had from users on Astroengine.com have asked the same thing. The response has gone from, "Cool, I can log in to my Facebook account!" to "What's the point?"
Comment by Facebook User — February 7, 2009 @ 1:19 am
I agree with comments. Facebook comments are difficult to find, I don't know if it's here or there. That makes it annoying as a communication tool. Ok there are messages but I already use email … Twitter rocks, it's not trying to do it all.
Comment by Tim — February 7, 2009 @ 5:39 am
@Mona:
Chris from BackType here — wondering what was unintuitive about claiming your comments published using FB connect. We've tried to make claiming comments on BackType very straightforward. You just fill out http://www.backtype.com/home/claim and click import.
Please let me know.
Comment by Christopher Golda — February 8, 2009 @ 10:10 am