Seeing the explosion in growth of Twitter right now, it’s pretty clear that the hot trend on the web is to have a service which acts as a central hub for information, and allows third-party sites and services to built on top of it. For most of its life, Facebook has been almost the exact opposite, insisting that developers work from within its walls to keep much of the data — and the users — there. Tomorrow, it looks like Facebook may be knocking down its dam to let its streams of data flow more freely.
Facebook is expected to announce that third-parties will now have access to data from the site that was previously unavailable, before an event set to take place at 4PM PST tomorrow. The Wall Street Journal has a few of the details, including that developers should be able to access the all-important photos and videos that users upload. Apparently, these third-party developers, assuming they get users’ permission to use this data, could build their own sites and services with some of it.
Also of note is that apparently Facebook will begin supporting more open standards for the transporting of data. It’s not yet clear exactly what this will mean, but presumably it could help alleviate some of the issues I wrote about last week in noting that Facebook, Google and others were creating what were essentially proprietary profiles, that forced all of us to actively use and update all of their services. I’ll be very interested to see what this means when it comes to Facebook Connect.
If Facebook really is opening most of its data, it would seem to me it’s a smart move to stop some of the momentum that smaller rivals, like Twitter, are getting. After all, Facebook still has its big stick — over 200 million users and more importantly, their data. Now it may be able to fully swing it.
[photo: flickr/rachel thecat]
REDUZCA EL CONSUMO ELECTRICO ,VISITE NUESTRO WEDSITE USE NUESTRO PRODUCTO
ACEPTAMOS TARJETAS DE CREDITO
(787)789-2834
wtf????
Shouldn’t comments like these be immediately deleted?
Spam control ppl! Come on!
The comment system here has been broken forever. One can’t rate comments, report comments or edit their own comments.
Before the announce news – only on TC. Homepage customisation was need of the hour on fb.
Seriously TC, why don’t you moderate your comments? TC is perhaps the only mainstream blog that doesn’t moderate its comments.
I understand you have 100s of comments, but if you have 10% of those 100s of comments as spams that’s a lot of spam.
Either moderate your comments or let the users report comment spams. Surely it can’t be that difficult?
This would be great. Hello photo host – goodbye PhotoBucket.
good call … flickr and other photo sharing site should do something about this. if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.
Thanks for the heads-up. I am removing access to at least some of my applications now.
I wonder if ning networks will take advantage of this change!
good thing they still dont’ have my birthday…
actually photos and albums and links and all are already available to apps. what is missing is the ability to read the latest items from the stream, which would lead to some interesting applications.
actually the apps that can best take advantage of are twitter-like desktop apps that will notify you when a friend sends a photo etc.
twitterers (what’s the term? ‘twats’?), be afraid
Right, apps within Facebook yes, but as I understand it, this will allow all of that data to flow outside of Facebook, meaning there can be third party sites using all the data, just as third party sites galore use Twitter data. I know some of it you can access outside Facebook now, but a lot more should be available starting tomorrow.
the whole API is available to third parties – that’s what facebook connect does. The data remains a property of facebook: third parties are only allowed to cache it for 24 hours
i mean, third party sites, sites external to facebook (iphone apps and desktop apps included)
Yeah, as I mention, not sure how/if Facebook Connect plays into this. Facebook isn’t talking yet (until tomorrow).
I’m not so sure this will compete with Twitter though. People will still use Facebook as a private network I believe because they aren’t willing to share all the personal information they have on it with just anyone. Sure you can change your permission settings on your profile to prevent that but it’s way to complicated for most people to mess with and therefore most won’t right away. Twitter profiles don’t have that much personal info on them so people are more willing to leave their profiles open for view.
Agreed on most points, though we’ll see how they implement this. If they make it easy and obvious to say, just send your status updates to third parties, that could be useful for building sites on top of FB — of course a lot of users people just import Twitter to be their FB status.
But pictures, videos and especially events could be interesting as well for third party services. We’ll see.
Great point, I agree but I think FriendFeed does a better job than Facebook can. I’m actually thinking FF has a few tricks up their sleeve to address this. I’m hoping they can implement full Twitter app capabilities. If so, they would be the perfect solution and probably find many more users making FF their default Twitter client/app. I touched on this a little in my last article if you’re interested.
if facebook does it right, they can have a defacto successful situation here (sadly, it will be a twitter-killer). all they need is a checkbox “make my stream public” and the ability to subscribe to non-friends public feeds.
i should also mention facebook has a much more robust platform that handles thousands of times more traffic than twitter.
i smell a david-goliath situation here
Another reason to avoid facebook and twitter: No shortage of users who force me to overhear their hyperbole and name calling. (’twats’ igniguy?) – repellent.
I don’t think so. There’s a reason why Twitter was able to succeed despite many competitors like identi.ca, pownce, and Facebook’s adoption of a similar layout. Moreover, user loyalty at Twitter is practically unheard of elsewhere. That is, in spite of Twitter having lots of downtime in the past, most users did not leave.
Facebook’s platform is large but it feels clunky and it’s slower. More importantly, when a business tries to do everything they tend to lose their identity. At some point quality suffers when quantity is the focus. Facebook’s layout is way to messy and the more they add the less I want.
“Moreover, user loyalty at Twitter is practically unheard of elsewhere. That is, in spite of Twitter having lots of downtime in the past, most users did not leave.”
People used to say the same thing about MySpace.
My guess for “more open standards” is for Facebook to embrace OAuth and OpenSocial which would be great for developers, so we don’t have to write separate integration code for all of the social networking sites, we can just use OAuth and OpenSocial.
Really, I think its too late
Myspace –> Facebook –> Twitter –> ??
Twitter just need to make some pic and vid loaders and everyone will be there on it soon enough. No one can be bothered (real people that is) to update more than one SS. (that puts twitpic out to pasture of course, a shame but it only took him a weekend to make it (own admission))
Seems like FB is being forced to cannibalize everything they’ve spent the past two years and tens of millions of dollars working on for the sole purpose of chasing Twitter. And they’re still coming up second best. This is what will kill Facebook.
Excellent point. You can be everything for everyone and the more you try to do it the less people want it.
love that picture…. lol
refreshing, isn’t it?
Watch for open Feeds and Shared Items. Some FB users might be left scrambling to reset their privacy settings. I agree with @djdrisco, OAuth or OpenSocial for FB would be preferable.
Too little too late. What were you thinking when you stated this? “over 200 million users and more importantly, their data. Now it may be able to fully swing it.”
You obviously do not read or understand the industry that well. Facebook is fucking toast.
Read and learn why bro.
“Facebook is in a particularly difficult predicament. Seventy percent of its 200 million members live outside the United States”
By http://www.nyti...;ref=technology
So this is the last ditch effort to pump up that valuation of theirs? When they solve the above problems lets see how it goes then. Until then I call them a 1.65 bill company , 3.5 bill tops.
this is the reason why i only signed up for facebook but never really use it. im on twitter 24/7. is that bad? hahaha
Heck no, I’m right there with you. I rarely check my Facebook profile now because of Twitter.
I will make sure to set up my calendar notification to 4:00 pm sharp just so that I can respond with a solid “who gives a shit”.
well said well said
Excellent point. You can be everything for everyone and the more you try to do it the less people want it.
Breaking news: R. Kelly is interested in playing in Facebook’s stream.
facebook vs twitter again
i thght fbook was desperately seeking money to manage costs of running their server yards …..going twitter way will only multiply the load on their servers n hence the cost …..
Would be nice if Myspace did this!
Wow, Facebook is starting to sound pretty cool but MySpace still kicks it to the curb!
RT
http://www.anonymity.es.tc
The concern obviously is how much data are they going to make available to these third party companies. Facebook contains a lot of personal information that we may not waant made available to the general public. It’s why there is a friends system, so that your full profile is viewable only by people you have approved
One site does not a trend make.
Facebook and also others like myspace have to find ways to stay unique and add some extra services. Otherwise someone else will and become bigger.
this is a nice marketing tool and really profitable depending on how an internet marketing agency work some strategies.
ilikesem.com
We are now supporting this in FriendBinder: http://blog.fri...support-in.html
I really wish everyone on facebook and twitter would have a huge meet up and then get destroyed by a tornado made out of sharks and volcanoes.
API FTWSeriously, I use twitter, but rarely the twitter site, because 3rd party apps are much better. I anticipate a similar outcome for Facebook.
Yea sounds like a great idea…………………………………….
I just wish they would enable RSS on the stream. Then google reader would be pretty much the only thing I visit regularly.
Oh yes, just what we need More spam in our feed! s