Facebook Makes Huge API Changes – Open Graph Protocol and Much More
april 2010 by rahuldave
Facebook has just introduced several sweeping new changes to its platform at F8, the annual conference for Facebook developers. The web has been abuzz about the implications of Facebook’s latest move towards making its platform available on as many web sites as possible.
As Bret Taylor, head of Facebook Platform products, noted on the Developer Blog, the next evolution of the platform focuses is based on two fairly important themes:
First, the Web is moving to a model based on the connections between people and all the things they care about. Second, this connections-based Web is well on its way to being built and providing value to both users and developers — the underlying graph of connections just needs to be mapped in a way that makes it easy to use and interoperable.
Targeting these two themes, Facebook has released three new components: social plugins, the Open Graph protocol, and the Graph API.
Social plugins enable developers to easily add user interaction to web pages (e.g., a “Like” button) using an <iframe> or a combination of XFBML and FaceBook’s JavaScript SDK. These plugins essentially provide establish a distributed means for content sharing and interaction in a fairly seamless way.
The Open Graph Protocol provides a way for developers to integrate content with Facebook’s social graph. In essence, this means that content can be linked with one or more users, across different parts of their profiles, including profile pages, activity streams, news feeds, and even search results. Currently the protocol is implemented by adding several tags to the <head> of a web page (based on the Open Graph Protocol namespace) and by including a “Like” button (social plugin). The specification for Open Graph Protocol has been published at http://opengraphprotocol.org/.
The Graph API is the next generation of the Facebook API, and it is aimed at providing access to various parts of Facebook’s social graph data. The new API is completely RESTful, and by default results are returned in JSON. Access to various data objects has been streamlined, as is evident by the examples below:
Users: https://graph.facebook.com/btaylor (Bret Taylor)
Pages: https://graph.facebook.com/cocacola (Coca-Cola page)
Events: https://graph.facebook.com/251906384206 (Facebook Developer Garage Austin)
Groups: https://graph.facebook.com/2204501798 (Emacs users group)
Applications: https://graph.facebook.com/2439131959 (the Graffiti app)
Status messages: https://graph.facebook.com/367501354973 (A status message from Bret)
Photos: https://graph.facebook.com/98423808305 (A photo from the Coca-Cola page)
Photo albums: https://graph.facebook.com/99394368305 (Coca-Cola’s wall photos)
Videos: https://graph.facebook.com/614004947048 (A Facebook tech talk on Tornado)
Notes: https://graph.facebook.com/122788341354 (Note announcing Facebook for iPhone 3.0)
Documentation for the new API is available, including advanced parts of the API such as FQL and FBML as well as the now deprecated “Old REST API.” Note that the new API utilizes OAuth 2.0 for authentication and it also includes integration with Insight, Facebook’s analytics service.
And there was one policy change announced today that got a big round of applause from the developer audience: third party applications may now retain Facebook for longer than 24 hours. According to Justin Smith at Inside Facebook, “the change was one primarily motivated by technical costs being created by the policy for developers, instead of any intended change in how developers should use user data.” And Mark Zuckerberg said that
Zynga has had to download user information 100 million times per day because of our policy. Developers were having to architect entire systems just to do this. There aren’t any other changes in the policies on how developers can use the data.
Whatever the motivation, while this can indeed make developers lives easier, it also raises privacy issues as more and more Facebook data gets moved outside of Facebook.
Overall, this is certainly a bold move by Facebook in its effort to expand its reach both in terms of users and content across the web (or what Jeremiah Owyang refers to as a “Crusade of Colonization”). The new API, coupled with the Open Graph Protocol and social plugins, present developers with several ways of tapping into the Facebook platform without much heavy lifting.
Related ProgrammableWeb Resources Facebook API Profile, 146 mashups
Facebook
f8
open_graph
semantic_web
from google
As Bret Taylor, head of Facebook Platform products, noted on the Developer Blog, the next evolution of the platform focuses is based on two fairly important themes:
First, the Web is moving to a model based on the connections between people and all the things they care about. Second, this connections-based Web is well on its way to being built and providing value to both users and developers — the underlying graph of connections just needs to be mapped in a way that makes it easy to use and interoperable.
Targeting these two themes, Facebook has released three new components: social plugins, the Open Graph protocol, and the Graph API.
Social plugins enable developers to easily add user interaction to web pages (e.g., a “Like” button) using an <iframe> or a combination of XFBML and FaceBook’s JavaScript SDK. These plugins essentially provide establish a distributed means for content sharing and interaction in a fairly seamless way.
The Open Graph Protocol provides a way for developers to integrate content with Facebook’s social graph. In essence, this means that content can be linked with one or more users, across different parts of their profiles, including profile pages, activity streams, news feeds, and even search results. Currently the protocol is implemented by adding several tags to the <head> of a web page (based on the Open Graph Protocol namespace) and by including a “Like” button (social plugin). The specification for Open Graph Protocol has been published at http://opengraphprotocol.org/.
The Graph API is the next generation of the Facebook API, and it is aimed at providing access to various parts of Facebook’s social graph data. The new API is completely RESTful, and by default results are returned in JSON. Access to various data objects has been streamlined, as is evident by the examples below:
Users: https://graph.facebook.com/btaylor (Bret Taylor)
Pages: https://graph.facebook.com/cocacola (Coca-Cola page)
Events: https://graph.facebook.com/251906384206 (Facebook Developer Garage Austin)
Groups: https://graph.facebook.com/2204501798 (Emacs users group)
Applications: https://graph.facebook.com/2439131959 (the Graffiti app)
Status messages: https://graph.facebook.com/367501354973 (A status message from Bret)
Photos: https://graph.facebook.com/98423808305 (A photo from the Coca-Cola page)
Photo albums: https://graph.facebook.com/99394368305 (Coca-Cola’s wall photos)
Videos: https://graph.facebook.com/614004947048 (A Facebook tech talk on Tornado)
Notes: https://graph.facebook.com/122788341354 (Note announcing Facebook for iPhone 3.0)
Documentation for the new API is available, including advanced parts of the API such as FQL and FBML as well as the now deprecated “Old REST API.” Note that the new API utilizes OAuth 2.0 for authentication and it also includes integration with Insight, Facebook’s analytics service.
And there was one policy change announced today that got a big round of applause from the developer audience: third party applications may now retain Facebook for longer than 24 hours. According to Justin Smith at Inside Facebook, “the change was one primarily motivated by technical costs being created by the policy for developers, instead of any intended change in how developers should use user data.” And Mark Zuckerberg said that
Zynga has had to download user information 100 million times per day because of our policy. Developers were having to architect entire systems just to do this. There aren’t any other changes in the policies on how developers can use the data.
Whatever the motivation, while this can indeed make developers lives easier, it also raises privacy issues as more and more Facebook data gets moved outside of Facebook.
Overall, this is certainly a bold move by Facebook in its effort to expand its reach both in terms of users and content across the web (or what Jeremiah Owyang refers to as a “Crusade of Colonization”). The new API, coupled with the Open Graph Protocol and social plugins, present developers with several ways of tapping into the Facebook platform without much heavy lifting.
Related ProgrammableWeb Resources Facebook API Profile, 146 mashups
april 2010 by rahuldave
Facebook Opens Up to the Web — Is That Good or Bad?
april 2010 by rahuldave
There has been plenty of talk about what Facebook would announce at the f8 conference this week, but the full magnitude of what the company has in mind didn’t really hit home until after the keynote by CEO Mark Zuckerberg and a related presentation by Chief Technology Officer Bret Taylor (Liz has a great overview of the issues here).
Both carried a single, unmistakable message: Facebook wants to own your activity on the Internet. Zuckerberg did his best to portray this as a great thing for users, but the corollary is inescapable: Facebook will be everywhere you are, watching what you do, keeping track of that data, and talking about what you’re doing to your friends and companies you “like.” A quick survey of the web shows that some seem to see this as a great idea (“Hey, I can show lots of cool stuff to my friends!”) and some are less enthusiastic (“Facebook is going to be following me and tracking my every movement!”).
The reaction from some observers on Twitter was positive. The LA Times said that it would “make sharing easier,” while Deborah Schultz of the Altimeter Group said, “A world that is more open and connected — always a good thing (despite some snarky comments); thanks FB for pushing open!!!” Her fellow Altimeter analyst Jeremiah Owyang was less enthused, however, describing it as Facebook’s “crusade of colonization.” The New York Times’s response was somewhat more tempered, calling it “Facebook to Go.”
Silicon Alley Insider called it a plan to “infiltrate the web,” and Silicon Beat said Facebook wants to “conquer the world.” Kevin Marks of BT, a former engineer with Technorati, said that “Facebook wants to replace links between sites with a database stored on their servers that they control access to,” and Eric Marcoullier (co-founder of Gnip and MyBlogLog) quipped: “Coldplay’s ‘when I ruled the world’ playing at F8. Interesting, if appropriate, choice.” Dan Gillmor of the Knight Center for Media Entrepreneurship summed it up by saying that “Facebook wants to be the Internet,” while Chris Dixon, co-founder of Hunch, said “we might look back at the 00’s as the golden age of the web, when we were ruled by Google, a benign dictator.”
As Liz has pointed out, the key to what Facebook wants to do is to control the hooks and tools that allow it to understand and participate in the social web, the “people-centered” web. By watching and indexing your “likes” and the likes of millions of others — Zuckerberg said that within 24 hours of his keynote, there would a billion “Like” buttons and plugins around the web — the company can create an incredibly powerful map of the relationships between people and their friends, and between people and the things they like, whether they are movies or bands or dishwashing detergent.
That’s a tremendous power to have, and the youthful CEO of Facebook makes it seem friendly and appealing. Why wouldn’t you want to share with your friends? But to use a popular phrase from Spider-Man, with great power comes great responsibility. Let’s hope Zuckerberg chooses to use his powers for good instead of evil.
Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Andrew Feinberg
CNN_Big_Tech
Mathew's_Posts
Media
NYT_Company_News
SYN_Straight_News
Social_Web
f8
facebook
Zuckerberg
from google
Both carried a single, unmistakable message: Facebook wants to own your activity on the Internet. Zuckerberg did his best to portray this as a great thing for users, but the corollary is inescapable: Facebook will be everywhere you are, watching what you do, keeping track of that data, and talking about what you’re doing to your friends and companies you “like.” A quick survey of the web shows that some seem to see this as a great idea (“Hey, I can show lots of cool stuff to my friends!”) and some are less enthusiastic (“Facebook is going to be following me and tracking my every movement!”).
The reaction from some observers on Twitter was positive. The LA Times said that it would “make sharing easier,” while Deborah Schultz of the Altimeter Group said, “A world that is more open and connected — always a good thing (despite some snarky comments); thanks FB for pushing open!!!” Her fellow Altimeter analyst Jeremiah Owyang was less enthused, however, describing it as Facebook’s “crusade of colonization.” The New York Times’s response was somewhat more tempered, calling it “Facebook to Go.”
Silicon Alley Insider called it a plan to “infiltrate the web,” and Silicon Beat said Facebook wants to “conquer the world.” Kevin Marks of BT, a former engineer with Technorati, said that “Facebook wants to replace links between sites with a database stored on their servers that they control access to,” and Eric Marcoullier (co-founder of Gnip and MyBlogLog) quipped: “Coldplay’s ‘when I ruled the world’ playing at F8. Interesting, if appropriate, choice.” Dan Gillmor of the Knight Center for Media Entrepreneurship summed it up by saying that “Facebook wants to be the Internet,” while Chris Dixon, co-founder of Hunch, said “we might look back at the 00’s as the golden age of the web, when we were ruled by Google, a benign dictator.”
As Liz has pointed out, the key to what Facebook wants to do is to control the hooks and tools that allow it to understand and participate in the social web, the “people-centered” web. By watching and indexing your “likes” and the likes of millions of others — Zuckerberg said that within 24 hours of his keynote, there would a billion “Like” buttons and plugins around the web — the company can create an incredibly powerful map of the relationships between people and their friends, and between people and the things they like, whether they are movies or bands or dishwashing detergent.
That’s a tremendous power to have, and the youthful CEO of Facebook makes it seem friendly and appealing. Why wouldn’t you want to share with your friends? But to use a popular phrase from Spider-Man, with great power comes great responsibility. Let’s hope Zuckerberg chooses to use his powers for good instead of evil.
Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Andrew Feinberg
april 2010 by rahuldave
Facebook Makes Itself a Central Point of Failure for the Web
april 2010 by rahuldave
Facebook, with its open graph announcements at the f8 conference today, is digging itself deep into the infrastructure of the web. Outside developers and existing sites will now be able to hook into Facebook users’ data and activities directly and persistently, keeping logs well beyond the previous limit of 24 hours.
Organizing the world’s information by powering it is clearly a direct affront to Google. Where Google observes links and relationships between web sites from a distance, Facebook aims to be the glue that connects the web itself. The implications are thrilling, but also scary — what if Facebook goes down?
The benefits of using a Facebook authentication system were already strong. Bret Taylor, Facebook’s director of product, at today’s keynote explained just how strong when speaking of his own struggle to grow FriendFeed, the real-time social company Facebook eventually acquired. Users who signed up for FriendFeed with Facebook Connect were four times more likely to become active than any other form of sign-up, said Taylor.
But now, beyond fostering better participation by inviting users to connect their real identities and their real relationships, web services will be able to use Facebook to explode user engagement and relationships. They can use Facebook’s social plugins to expose personalized friend activity and recommendations. And Facebook will establish persistent, dynamic links to users’ participation on connected sites around the web through its “like” buttons.
Users now have the ability to express their interests not only by saying what they like — say, a local restaurant — but by saying what web site represents it — say, a Yelp review page, instead of the official restaurant site. Web services would be silly not to participate.
As a user, having your social self represent you around the web will at first be creepy but ultimately be useful. As one Facebook engineer put it to me today, “Imagine if you had one login for the whole web. That would be so sweet.”
In preparation for f8, a few Facebook employees hacked together examples of what outside developers could do given the new open graph tools. For instance, Facebook.me would allow users to use Facebook as a CMS. Say you’re one of those crazy MySpace devotees who wants blinking disco lights on your profile. Great. Make a web page, host it at whatever URL you want, uglify it to your heart’s content, and port in data that dynamically connects to Facebook. You can imagine brands and small businesses might want to use this in lieu of a traditional web page.
Another demo, KlugePress, gives the ability to use a nice template and port in Facebook event information. Only users who are invited to the event on Facebook would be able to load a KlugePress invite (this is tricky, and wasn’t really figured out yet for the demo). If users are logged in to Facebook and have permitted access, they can RSVP, comment and see details as they would on the bland Facebook event page. The data itself is sent right back to Facebook. (Pictured above is a KlugePress skin on an older event from my own profile.)
By inviting developers to integrate with it so tightly, Facebook is enabling new opportunities — but also asking for an awful lot of trust.
Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my bio.
Liz's_Posts
SYN_Straight_News
Social_Web
f8
facebook
from google
Organizing the world’s information by powering it is clearly a direct affront to Google. Where Google observes links and relationships between web sites from a distance, Facebook aims to be the glue that connects the web itself. The implications are thrilling, but also scary — what if Facebook goes down?
The benefits of using a Facebook authentication system were already strong. Bret Taylor, Facebook’s director of product, at today’s keynote explained just how strong when speaking of his own struggle to grow FriendFeed, the real-time social company Facebook eventually acquired. Users who signed up for FriendFeed with Facebook Connect were four times more likely to become active than any other form of sign-up, said Taylor.
But now, beyond fostering better participation by inviting users to connect their real identities and their real relationships, web services will be able to use Facebook to explode user engagement and relationships. They can use Facebook’s social plugins to expose personalized friend activity and recommendations. And Facebook will establish persistent, dynamic links to users’ participation on connected sites around the web through its “like” buttons.
Users now have the ability to express their interests not only by saying what they like — say, a local restaurant — but by saying what web site represents it — say, a Yelp review page, instead of the official restaurant site. Web services would be silly not to participate.
As a user, having your social self represent you around the web will at first be creepy but ultimately be useful. As one Facebook engineer put it to me today, “Imagine if you had one login for the whole web. That would be so sweet.”
In preparation for f8, a few Facebook employees hacked together examples of what outside developers could do given the new open graph tools. For instance, Facebook.me would allow users to use Facebook as a CMS. Say you’re one of those crazy MySpace devotees who wants blinking disco lights on your profile. Great. Make a web page, host it at whatever URL you want, uglify it to your heart’s content, and port in data that dynamically connects to Facebook. You can imagine brands and small businesses might want to use this in lieu of a traditional web page.
Another demo, KlugePress, gives the ability to use a nice template and port in Facebook event information. Only users who are invited to the event on Facebook would be able to load a KlugePress invite (this is tricky, and wasn’t really figured out yet for the demo). If users are logged in to Facebook and have permitted access, they can RSVP, comment and see details as they would on the bland Facebook event page. The data itself is sent right back to Facebook. (Pictured above is a KlugePress skin on an older event from my own profile.)
By inviting developers to integrate with it so tightly, Facebook is enabling new opportunities — but also asking for an awful lot of trust.
Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my bio.
april 2010 by rahuldave
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