Facebook Javascript Library
Facebook has announced the release of a new set of tools for application developers. The tools allow developers to access Facebook information from javascript code. This means that applications have the ability to make contact with Facebook directly from your browser. Previously, an application would start in your browser and connect to the application developer’s server, which would then talk to Facebook on your behalf. This new javascript library allows an application to display Facebook information on a site outside of Facebook, such as another website or your blog.
Jeremiah Owyang has translated the geek-speak of Facebook’s release into something that is meaningful to business folks. I’d only offer one correction to the following statement in Jeremiah’s post:
This means that web owners can now embed existing Facebook applications easier than before.
Most existing Facebook applications were designed to display information within Facebook. Facebook has its own set of proprietary formatting codes. These codes are not the same as the HTML that you use to run on your website. While the new javascript tools will open up new options for distributed Facebook widgets, don’t expect your favorite Facebook Profile application to run on your website today or tomorrow. Some work will need to be done to existing applications to allow them to run outside of the Facebook platform.
I will need to discuss this with my fellow developers on Facebook and learn more about the constraints on using this new library. For instance, the TOS states that you cannot store user information for more than 24 hours. If my application stores Facebook data on a client’s machine using Google Gears, what is my responsibility and how will I ensure that the data is removed? This would have been an issue for Facebook desktop applications, but to my knowledge there haven’t been that many desktop apps and perhaps those tools didn’t store a lot of data. There will be much more discussion on this topic in the coming days, and I hope some of these questions will be answered.
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