Facebook and its platform (Travelogue)

Facebook and its platform

After reading up so much on the facebook hype I had to give it a shot. So last week I finally created an account on facebook just to see what the whole facebook platform is about and why is it getting so much press.

My First impressions of facebook
- its clean
- UI is snappy and responsive
- I can trust it enough to let it browse my mailbox to pull up contacts
- Less of spam compared to orkut ( till now )
- Lots of applications

Now the about the whole platform. I was surprised to see that the number of applications available for facebook has already crossed 1000 and there are applications of all kinds from videos/book lists/music/graffiti/notes etc etc. Its surprising that how by providing a simple API they are able to harness the creativity of so many people to come up with some really interesting applications.

This piqued my curiosity to see what the platform was all about. I ended up reading it and it seems very similar to stuff we had been trying to achieve in our last project.

- a SQL based query language on top of the facebook's object database.
- It has similar restrictions to the kinds we had when we were thinking of how to implement a usable query language on top of objects ( not a full blown OQL implementation)
- The WebApis are just simple wrappers on top of FSQL which help in packing/unpacking of data etc.

Overall the idea is not revolutionary but what makes it amazing not the FSQL part but the UI integration that they have done. Modularizing everything in their UI and providing hookups for user applications into the UI is done very very neatly.

Applications don't break the feel of the site, most facebook apps go along with a UI and are for most practical purposes indistinguishable from applications developed by facebook themselves. I think this is what makes the facebook platform extraordinary and the reason for the exponential growth of the applications on facebook. Already there are a whole bunch of applications that are providing integration points between facebook and other external applications namely flickr, upcoming and a whole bunch of other apps on the web.

The only thing I am not sure is how facebook plans to regulate the applications being developed. I understand that the actual authentication is done by facebook servers themselves but what about the data that application stores about you. How much trust do we place in these people developing these applications to store/forward our data?

I think the next step for facebook will be some kind of trustworthiness factor or else I see a lot of potential for abuse extending to but not limited to phishing attempts/privacy issues etc. I am sure my understanding of the facebook platform at this point is limited but hopefully as I play around with it a bit more I will be able to revisit this post and add further information on the platform.