The Facebook Platform provides a set of APIs and tools which enable third-party developers to integrate with the "open graph" — whether through applications on Facebook
Facebook
Facebook is a social networking service and website launched in February 2004, operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. , Facebook has more than 800 million active users. Users must register before using the site, after which they may create a personal profile, add other users as...
.com or external websites and devices. Launched on May 24, 2007, Facebook Platform has evolved from enabling development just on Facebook.com to one also supporting integration across the web and devices.
Facebook Platform statistics as of May 2010:
More than one million developers and entrepreneurs from more than 180 countries
More than 550,000 active applications currently on Facebook Platform
Every month, more than 70% of Facebook users engage with Platform applications
More than 250,000 websites have integrated with Facebook Platform
More than 100 million Facebook users engage with Facebook on external websites every month
Third party companies provide application metrics, and several blog
Blog
A blog is a type of website or part of a website supposed to be updated with new content from time to time. Blogs are usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in...
s have sprung up in response to the clamor for Facebook applications. On July 4, 2007, Altura Ventures announced the "Altura 1 Facebook Investment Fund," becoming the world's first Facebook-only venture capital firm.
On August 29, 2007, Facebook changed the way in which the popularity of applications is measured, to give attention to the more engaging applications, following criticism that ranking applications only by the number of people who had installed the application was giving an advantage to the highly viral, yet useless applications.
Tech blog Valleywag
Valleywag
Valleywag was a Gawker Media blog with gossip and news about Silicon Valley personalities. It was initially launched under the direction of editor Nick Douglas in February 2006. After Douglas was fired, the blog was taken over by Owen Thomas. Thomas himself left in May 2009, to be replaced by Ryan...
has criticized Facebook Applications, labeling them a "cornucopia of uselessness." Others have called for limiting third-party applications so the Facebook user experience
User experience
User experience is the way a person feels about using a product, system or service. User experience highlights the experiential, affective, meaningful and valuable aspects of human-computer interaction and product ownership, but it also includes a person’s perceptions of the practical aspects such...
is not degraded.
Primarily attempting to create viral applications is a method that has certainly been employed by numerous Facebook application developers. Stanford University
Stanford University
The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university on an campus located near Palo Alto, California. It is situated in the northwestern Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula, approximately northwest of San...
even offered a class in the Fall of 2007, entitled, Computer Science (CS) 377W: "Create Engaging Web Applications Using Metrics and Learning on Facebook". Numerous applications created by the class were highly successful, and ranked amongst the top Facebook applications, with some achieving over 3.5 million users in a month.
History
Facebook launched the Facebook Platform on May 24, 2007, providing a framework
Software framework
In computer programming, a software framework is an abstraction in which software providing generic functionality can be selectively changed by user code, thus providing application specific software...
A software developer is a person concerned with facets of the software development process. Their work includes researching, designing, developing, and testing software. A software developer may take part in design, computer programming, or software project management...
Application software, also known as an application or an "app", is computer software designed to help the user to perform specific tasks. Examples include enterprise software, accounting software, office suites, graphics software and media players. Many application programs deal principally with...
Facebook is a social networking website, founded in 2004. This is a list of features that can be found on the Facebook website, as well as technology features on the website.-Chat:...
A markup language is a modern system for annotating a text in a way that is syntactically distinguishable from that text. The idea and terminology evolved from the "marking up" of manuscripts, i.e. the revision instructions by editors, traditionally written with a blue pencil on authors' manuscripts...
called Facebook Markup Language was introduced simultaneously; it is used to customize the "look and feel" of applications that developers create. Using the Platform, Facebook launched several new applications, including Gifts, allowing users to send virtual gifts to each other, Marketplace, allowing users to post free classified ads, Events, giving users a method of informing their friends about upcoming events, and Video, letting users share homemade videos with one another.
Applications that have been created on the Platform include chess
Chess
Chess is a two-player board game played on a chessboard, a square-checkered board with 64 squares arranged in an eight-by-eight grid. It is one of the world's most popular games, played by millions of people worldwide at home, in clubs, online, by correspondence, and in tournaments.Each player...
, which both allow users to play games with their friends. In such games, a user's moves are saved on the website, allowing the next move to be made at any time rather than immediately after the previous move.
By November 3, 2007, seven thousand applications had been developed on the Facebook Platform, with another hundred created every day. By the second annual f8 developers conference on July 23, 2008, the number of applications had grown to 33,000, and the number of registered developers had exceeded 400,000.
Within a few months of launching the Facebook Platform, issues arose regarding "application spam
Spam (electronic)
Spam is the use of electronic messaging systems to send unsolicited bulk messages indiscriminately...
", which involves Facebook applications "spamming" users to request it be installed.
Facebook integration was announced for the Xbox 360
Xbox 360
The Xbox 360 is the second video game console produced by Microsoft and the successor to the Xbox. The Xbox 360 competes with Sony's PlayStation 3 and Nintendo's Wii as part of the seventh generation of video game consoles...
The is a handheld game system created by Nintendo and launched in 2008 and 2009 in Japan, North America, PAL territories, and other regions. It is the third iteration of the Nintendo DS, and its primary market rival is Sony's PlayStation Portable...
on June 1, 2009 at E3. On November 18, 2009, Sony announced an integration with Facebook to deliver the first phase of a variety of new features to further connect and enhance the online social experiences of PlayStation 3. On February 2, 2010, Facebook announced the release of HipHop for PHP
HipHop for PHP
HipHop for PHP is a source code transformer for PHP script code. HipHop programmatically transforms PHP source code into highly optimized C++ and then uses g++ to compile it to machine code...
as an opensource project.
Graph API
The Graph API is the core of Facebook Platform, enabling developers to read from and write data into Facebook.The Graph API presents a simple, consistent view of the Facebook social graph, uniformly representing objects in the graph (e.g., people, photos, events, and pages) and the connections between them (e.g., friend relationships, shared content, and photo tags).
Authentication
Facebook authentication enables developers’ applications to interact with the Graph API on behalf of Facebook users, and it provides a single-sign on mechanism across web, mobile, and desktop apps.
Social plugins
Social plugins – including the Like Button, Recommendations, and Activity Feed – enable developers to provide social experiences to their users with just a few lines of HTML. All social plugins are extensions of Facebook and are specifically designed so no user data is shared with the sites on which they appear.
Open Graph protocol
The Open Graph protocol enables developers to integrate their pages into the social graph
Social graph
The social graph is a term coined by scientists working in the social areas of graph theory. It has been described as "the global mapping of everybody and how they're related"...
. These pages gain the functionality of other graph objects including profile links and stream updates for connected users. The implications that the Open Graph may have on the web as a whole relate significantly to the idea of search engines. While currently Google still attracts more traffic than any other website, Facebook is a close second. Even without a good internal search engine, Facebook already drives more traffic for some searches, specifically social searches, than Google itself. And in attempting to link Facebook with the rest of the web, the Open Graph is creating Facebook’s own extensive and highly interactive version of a search engine. Web pages are turned into Open Graph Objects by adding metadata. As an example, the following is the Open Graph protocol markup for ieKeyboard on Software Master Center:
Iframes
Facebook uses iframes to allow third-party developers to create applications that are hosted separately from Facebook, but operate within a Facebook session and are accessed through a user's profile. Since iframes essentially nest independent websites within a Facebook session, their content is distinct from Facebook formatting.
Before iframes, Facebook used 'Facebook Markup Language (FBML)' to allow Facebook Application developer
Software developer
A software developer is a person concerned with facets of the software development process. Their work includes researching, designing, developing, and testing software. A software developer may take part in design, computer programming, or software project management...
s to customize the "look and feel" of their applications
Application software
Application software, also known as an application or an "app", is computer software designed to help the user to perform specific tasks. Examples include enterprise software, accounting software, office suites, graphics software and media players. Many application programs deal principally with...
, to a limited extent. FBML is a specification of how to encode content so that Facebook's server
Server (computing)
In the context of client-server architecture, a server is a computer program running to serve the requests of other programs, the "clients". Thus, the "server" performs some computational task on behalf of "clients"...
s can read and publish it, which is needed in the Facebook-specific feed so that Facebook's system can properly parse content and publish it as specified. FBML set by any application is cached by Facebook until a subsequent API call replaces it. Facebook also offers a specialized Facebook JavaScript (FBJS) library.
Facebook stopped accepting new FBML applications on March 18, 2011, but continued to support existing FBML tabs and applications. FBML will no longer be supported as of January 1, 2012, and FBML will no longer function as of June 1, 2012.
Facebook Connect
Facebook Connect is a set of APIs from Facebook that enable Facebook members to log onto third-party websites, applications, mobile devices and gaming systems with their Facebook identity. While logged in, users can connect with friends via these media and post information and updates to their Facebook profile. Developers can use these services to help their users connect and share with their Facebook friends on and off of Facebook and increase engagement for their website or application.
Originally unveiled during Facebook’s developer conference, F8, in July 2008, Facebook Connect became generally available in December 2008. According to an article from The New York Times, "Some say the services are representative of surprising new thinking in Silicon Valley. Instead of trying to hoard information about their users, the Internet companies (including Facebook, Google, MySpace and Twitter) all share at least some of that data so people do not have to enter the same identifying information again and again on different sites."
Since launching Facebook Connect, the company has rolled out additional features related to the services some of which include: Translations for Connect; Facebook Connect Wizard and Facebook Connect for the Mobile Web.
Facebook Connect cannot be used by users in locations that cannot access Facebook (e.g. China), even if the third-party site is otherwise accessible from that location.
Microformats
In February 2011, Facebook began to use the hCalendar
HCalendar
hCalendar is a microformat standard for displaying a semantic HTML representation of iCalendar-format calendar information about an event, on web pages, using HTML classes and rel attributes....
