Facebook’s Wide Open

The Wall Street Journal reports that Facebook is set to announce that they will be opening up their API to include user-contributed information for third-party developers. Developers will now be granted –with users’ permission– the ability to access and build sites and services using Facebook user’s notes, comments, and of course the most compelling  photos, and videos.

This move is a significant change for Facebook, which in the past has caught heat from the Tech Community for being too tight over control of the site’s data and how developers interact with it, though the motive behind this seems to be more in response to Twitter’s API successes than critic’s complaints. There’s no doubt that if granted access, developers will now have the ability to create more robust and relevant applications, and if privacy is your concern, the report states that Facebook privacy settings will extend to any new services built using the API.

What does this all really mean though.  It means we will start to see similar behavior that we have seen with Twitter, with full fledged business being built off the application.  The manifestation will probably be services that interact with Facebook via an application that will ask for permission to access your content, not unlike Facebook Connect.  The most compelling offering is the access to video and photos that the move will allow for, almost sounds like a marraige of Facebook+YouTube+Twitter and really makes be wonder what type of creative services will be spawned from this new direction.  What type of services do you think we will see and what type do you think have potential to become successful businesses?

Updated:
TechCrunch confirmed the Wall Street Journal’s original report with additional information.  Mainly what is now being called the Open Stream API, it will allow developers to use live real-time streams of information from Facebook.  The new Seesmic Desktop client is the first to use the API.  The new API is two-way and also makes only one API call.  Erick Schonfeld was able to speak with Ethan Beard, Facebook’s director of platform marketing, who gave a little insight on what the API could be used for:

A developer could recreate the entire Facebook home page if he wanted to or take parts of the feed and remix it to make something more interesting.

Schonfeld speculates on how the API could be used for filtering your activity stream and social search:

It would be simple to create an app that shows you the most liked or most commented on items in your stream, for example. Or now that stream can be plugged into various social search engines to give you socialized results.

via TechCrunch