If you are living in a major related to computers and/or the science thereof, you probably got the message this morning when you logged into facebook that they now have an API for you to take advantage of. At first I was like, “Oh, wow! Get ready for the rad-sauce applications built on the facebook development platform to come out!” But after a close perusal of their API, it’s pretty terrrible. It doesn’t give you access to much, and it’s all read-only anyway. I understand they need to protect their platform, but come on. What’s the point of releasing an API where all I can do is check how many unread messages I have? How many different applications can be built with that kind of functionality?

At any rate, I spent the morning dallying around with said API and came up with a cheesy little module for my sidebar. It’s really not very useful; it’s very slow (because their API response servers are slow and also because the API provides only bulky requests); and you can’t stay logged in for more than ten minutes because their servers time out after that. So it’s not even something where you can log in and then just check back on my site for your message count and a random photo. It also is locked to my server: you can’t just log into facebook and then my program will know that you’re logged in, no. That would have been too simple.

Well, it’s still in beta. Maybe they’ll get a clue.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 15th, 2006 at 4:41 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.