Saturday

Social Network

Facebook Opens Up: Lets Developers Access Status Updates, Notes, Links, and Videos

• Tweet
• Sharebar

• Tweet

Facebook announced a major update to its API tonight that will allow developers to read and post status updates, links, and notes to Facebook. In addtion, Facebook now also allows third-party developers to start applications that can upload videos frankly to a user’s account. The benefit already had an API for uploading and viewing photos.

Sponsor

The company also announced that its users now share over 24 million links every month, and that more than 15 million of its users update their status every day.

Attacking Twitter?

As Nick O’Neill on the AllFacebook blog points out, this go can be seen as a direct attack against Twitter. The ahead of schedule success of Twitter, after all, was mostly based upon the availability of an API that allowed for the creation of a thriving ecosystem that went far further than what Twitter’s developers had originally envisioned.

Making an Ecosystem

Looking at the announcement, Facebook clearly hopes that a similar ecosystem can develop around its new API. As an example, Facebook clarifies that it would now be very simple for a travel app to allow its users to start and share notes on Facebook with text, pictures, and videos.

Tearing Down the Wall

Facebook is slowly tearing down the wall around its silo and is starting to expose more of its data to the outside, which can only be a excellent thing. Just this week, Facebook also joined the OpenID Foundation. Here are some legitimate questions about what this means for both OpenID and Facebook Connect, but it looks like Facebook is moving in the right direction.

Discuss