Facebook Opens Their Doors to Stuff
Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook
Facebook announced the opening up of their news stream to developers today, allowing for all sorts of new, fancy whizbang desktop clients to be developed using the Facebook API. The immediate impact of this annoucement is that existing applications such as Seesmic Desktop and Tweetdeck, Adobe Air apps which already have rudimentary access to the Facebook firehose, will now gain even greater functionality, and possibly have some very cool applications and advancements in the very near future. Mobile apps will also likely see a huge boost. Imagine a full fledged iPhone/Palm Pre/Blackberry application, integrating the Facebook news feed into a stream with other services, such as Twitter and FriendFeed.
Of course, this comes with a caveat. The stream of data which developers can access can be mixed around, messed with, and generally tossed around, but in the end, this information can only be displayed BACK to the original user. So, really, in the end you’re getting the same old Facebook news stream you had before, simply displayed back to you in an altered form. While this is still pretty cool, it doesn’t offer the same type of openness and coolness that Twitter and similar platforms offers.
Another aspect of the newly opened up Facebook is how applications and their access will be treated in the future. Will Facebook applications move into the desktop, and run as web apps within the applications developed? Will current games and applications integrate the Facebook news stream more tightly to the processes? Potentially, Facebook could become a unified social profile and identity, when combined with Facebook connect, that other services such as Disqus (which we use as our commenting engine here at Geek Troika!) are attempting to do.
The annoucement by Facebook represents a pretty big step forward, since the service has always been pretty dramatically closed and shut off. What the future holds for Facebook beyond a social service will be part of what defines it as a larger aspect of our social and Internet lives.
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