Data Grows Up: Facebook Platform

The biggest boost from Social Networking Sites to other sites and services is in providing rich sources of user-specific data. This can allow sites to try to tailor more content directly to certain types of users (based on some sort of predetermined status) such as sending announcements to users that have specific bands in their Favorite Music section. This data set also allows for the sending of messages through the network of a person: if they like something, their friends may like it as well. As a result, as more and more sites link data through Facebook or Facebook like services I expect to see a rise in targeted marketing as more and more sites scrape the visible parts of Facebook based on my login to try and get more money out of me.

FQL is an interesting and seems to be a pretty well thought out idea. Afterall, if I'm creating a program to work with Facebook I want some way to get at their delicious data (it may make my life easier, allow my program to do interesting tricks, or to make money), but you obviously cannot expose all that data without ensuring security. And FQL seems like a very logical thing to do to allow programmers easy and controlled access to your data. And then marrying that with the FBML to force the use and acquisition of session IDs is the icing on the cake to stable and safe accesses, while also allowing the Facebook data backend the tight expected inputs that should allow them to monitor and improve their latency issues.

The most interesting part of the discussion I found was the section on the acquisition of the session ID, not because of the process itself, but rather what seems to be an unexpected piece of fallout from it. I have several friends who do Facebook games in their spare time and I am getting a large number of notifications from them or the programs asking me to join in with them. And for some reason, that I probably could have looked up but seems to have been answered for me thanks to this discussion, I would have to actually login to the game and activate my Facebook account with it in order to ban it from sending me notifications. Seems that when Facebook built it so that a 3rd party application needs you to register your user ID with the game's application ID they weren't considering that a user may want to ban access to and notifications from that game without first handing the game access to their personal information. Strangely enough though, it should be pretty simple to make those bannings a thing attached to Facebook itself, especially since each game has a known application ID.