Facebook Cracks, Here Come the Apps
The Facebook stream is now wide open for developers.
The social networking site has launched its new Facebook Open Stream API, a set of tools developers can use to build apps that let users read, interact with and write to their Facebook stream. The company announced the arrival of the new API, which uses the emerging Activity Streams standard, in a blog post Monday morning.
Update: Also on Monday, the company announced it will soon offer support for OpenID logins.
The Facebook “stream” is the constantly updating river of news that displays what’s going on with you, your friends and whatever tidbits they’re talking about or sharing. Facebook defines the stream as the “the core Facebook product experience.” That’s definitely been the case since last month, when the site changed its default page design to bring the stream front and center.
The Open Stream API gives developers access to that flood of real-time information, and not just to re-publish it elsewhere, but to publish to it and interact with it by leaving comments. Soon, we’ll see specially-built third-party apps for interacting with Facebook, much like FriendFeed and similar sites allow for other social networking services. These apps will be able to let users filter content to see only specific types of posts, comment on items and mark items as favorites. These apps will be able to access Facebook from the desktop, through the browser and via mobile devices.
The new API represents a significant step towards open data sharing on the web. Facebook was one of the great walled gardens — a massive social network of around 200 million active users that was closed off from the rest of the social web. Recently, however, the company has taken steps towards supporting social web standards like OpenID and opening user profiles to public web searches. With Monday’s development, a large chunk of Facebook data becomes as portable as the user chooses to allow it to be — a change we’ve been arguing in favor of for a long while.
It’s a huge win for the open web, and to see why, it’s helpful to study what’s going on behind the scenes.
The Rise of Activity Streams
Facebook’s new API uses the emerging Activity Streams standard. This standard, which MySpace has also taken steps to adopt, proposes a unified model for publishing social networking activities on the web. It standardizes the way sites represent a user’s activity by using an “actor,” “verb,” and “object-type” model: a common way of announcing an event like, “Tom posted a photo” or “Becky left a comment on this video.”
Defining standards for those elements lets any application publish a stream that can be easily read and filtered by other applications. It ensures all the syndicated data coming out of social applications is well-formed so those apps can all play together nicely.
Chris Messina, an advocate of open data standards on the web and one of the authors of Activity Streams sees Monday’s announcement as a possible major development for the social web.
“What I hope it means,” he tells Webmonkey, “is that developers can focus more on creating compelling user experiences that make the most of the richness of activity data from all over the web ���- spending less time hard-coding support for individual providers. This should accelerate the rate of innovation, I think, by creating an incentive for publishers to publish activities in a standard format in order to benefit from these kinds of applications.”
Messina also notes that this is just the beginning for the standard.
“I think it’ll start simple, with services that probably look like the old Facebook, or like Friendfeed,” he predicts, “and over time expand to include experiences focused on certain types of activities… giving rise to a whole medley of applications that serve individual needs but that all make use of the same kind of data.”
For an interesting take on what Facebook’s next steps should be, check out Marshall Kirkpatrick’s essay Read/Write Web titled “Despite New Openness, Facebook Remains Fundamentally Closed.” In it, Kirkpatrick argues that only by allowing persistent access to user stream data — a move that would require Facebook to rethink its privacy policies — will this API be as useful as other social tools on the web, such as those offered by Twitter.
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