International Law

Facebook extends platform

All Facebook, an unofficial Facebook blog, comments on a significant but under-reported development:

I surely did not see this coming anytime soon but Facebook just released their JavaScript client library than enables developers to extend their applications to their own websites. Rather than building your applications strictly within Facebook you can now extend the full functionality of the platform to your own website and leverage Facebook as the tool for managing members and their relationships. Somehow nobody has seemed to take note of this significant step.

Want to build your own social gaming platform that resides on your own website but leverages the power of users? Facebook relationships? Now you can! There had previously been applications that could leverage the Facebook API prior to the launch of the platform but there are some significant differences now versus before. The first significant difference is the broader access to Facebook?s core features that the platform provides.

The second difference is that Facebook has now implemented the ability to leverage cookies to access a user?s data even when they are not at your application. Since this just launched last night, I have yet to see any applications (or websites) take advantage of this new feature. This is a huge step in Facebook extending their platform beyond the Facebook.com domain and letting people leverage the power of the ?social graph? (I hate to use that phrase in this context but oh well).

Read more here.

Full post as published by Freedom to Differ on January 26, 2008 (boomark / email).