Facebook Releases New Inbox, Notification APIs
Facebook released two new APIs aimed at spurring developers to create new features around its messaging and notifications systems, and also introduced a simplified way for developers to let users attach application content to messages, the company said in a blog post this afternoon. This is a big opportunity for developers, Facebook’s Platform Manager Dave Morin points out, as the freshly released APIs, “Inbox API” and “notifications API,” enable developers to build innovative features on core Facebook product experiences that haven’t been open to third-parties before.
Now developers can create features within applications that allow Facebook users to read their messages and be alerted of notifications without logging into the actual Facebook site or their email. Because of this new capability, Nick O’Neill over at AllFacebook predicts that by the end of this year, “we could soon see just about all of our Facebook interactions being made accessible through 3rd party applications.” The Inbox API lets developers display users’ Facebook messages within an application. For example, Morin said developers could create applications that stream a user’s Facebook messages alongside their email client program, such as Outlook. The Inbox API is read-only, so developers can access users’ Facebook messages with their permission, but can’t send messages via this API just yet. Similar to the Inbox API, the notifications API lets Facebook users access their notifications outside of the social network’s site or email. Facebook for Adobe AIR currently uses the two APIs to show message alerts and notifications alongside its application window. The release of these new APIs continue Facebook’s support of developing more creative and useful applications into its platform rather than time-wasting, frivolous ones.
I use digsby to receive updates from Facebook. Its a great tool to see who is online and enables me to chat with my contact without login directly into the social network via the browser.
Looking forward to the new external Facebook services and hope that facebook is going to include the export of contact data to local mashines with this new “move” into openness!
Ugh.
The fact that they didn’t just use IMAP shows how Facebook is such a walled off garden.
Yet they escape the criticism even Apple (who is generally immune from criticism) gets.
And no, using IMAP wouldn’t open things up to spam, it can still be an internal system with no external ways to send spam (IMAP != SMTP)
yuck ..
It sounds like yet another way for lame applications to remind me to join so-and-so’s mafia or receive more poker chips.
It is interesting in the sense that they’re looking to grab more of a user’s time even when the user is not on the site. People can be interacting with Facebook in a way that more closely resembles Twitter. The downside to that is that is that Facebook’s business model is driven by ad sales. If more of their users choose to get updates outside of the browser, users don’t see ads. In this scenario, their resources are increasingly consumed (servers etc.) but their ads revenue goes down.
It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out.