The Facebook Open Stream API | Hacker News Reader

The Facebook Open Stream API

developers.facebook.com

51 pointspeter12329 comments

This is a fairly bold and well-timed move by Facebook.

Viewing the stream was the last "feature" that was controlled entirely by Facebook, and is one of the primary reasons people come back to visit facebook.com. With this move, Facebook moves away from being a website and towards being a pure infrastructure/platform play; they own the social graph and they are the platform for pushing information through it.

I have always thought that Twitter wouldn't stand a chance if Facebook moved in this direction. Twitter has surprised everyone recently with their growth, but their survival is now hinged primarily on their great publicity rather than any fundamental strategic position. A lot of people still perceive them as a primary force in asymmetric 1-to-many communication, but in fact Facebook is taking this territory with public profiles and pages. Most Facebook pages have at least as many followers as their Twitter counterparts, and these pages can now publish into the stream the same way Twitter can.

Now if only people would build useful stuff on the Facebook platform instead of a bunch of spammy crap.

The problem I see is that most useful applications don't want to be tied to facebook.

Absolutely. I'm trying to wrap my head around it but I can't.

I'm assuming you mean tied in the "tied down" sense.

On the one hand there are downsides and risks being tied to a platform, but on the other hand there are huge opportunities. For applications that are inherently social or have a strong social component, it's going to be very valuable or necessary to live on the social graph. Until now, those companies have had to try to build their own, which is very difficult or impossible.

For now a lot of developers just see Facebook as a way to spread virally, which has led to a lot of annoying spam machines.

Facebook seems like it's capable of everything that twitter does, and more, and easier. It's just a matter of making it open and accessible and making it so that people actually make use of the features. It seems like they're on the right track. Twitters massive growth has shocked them into fast action.

The primary difference is that Facebook's social network remains closed while Twitter's is open. Twitter's friend system is asymmetric while Facebook's is symmetric; I don't see how Facebook can really compete with Twitter except in friend-to-friend, reciprocal streams.

Facebook can compete by removing the symmetry. They seem to be moving in that direction.

While they're at it they should introduce a batch-remove-friends button, too. http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/03/a-new-approach-to-facebook.h...

But I don't want an asymmetric Facebook.

Have you ever hidden someone from your timeline? You already have an asymmetric Facebook, with too few hooks.

They have added an asymmetric relationship: "fans" rather than "friends". It's a matter of better surfacing it and making it available for individuals, not just "Pages"

EDIT: I was right, there is a new "Subscribe to John" link on profiles today.

Yeah, I noted the stress on pages too. I didn't know they applied it to people.

"Fans" has way too much weight to it. "People you follow" and "followers" is actually a very straightforward description of the relationship on twitter. Facebook should change their terminology. This is a case of legacy hurting ideal design. They've had "fans" for some time.

"We... are happy to be one of the first companies to implement Activity Streams at scale." What a subtle shot at their competition.

Facebook needs to make sure they don't have trolls doing their marketing, since basically everything they do is the first time it's been done at that scale.

for better or worse in many cases fb still acts like a young startup, they try new things, change stuff and are constantly shipping new features. I love that they are an independent company. These traits more than anything else is why they are crushing myspace in the main stream crowd, and staying current with the early adopters.

Looks like facebook just upped their ante in it's game to squash twitter.

I think it's working as well.

It'd be really interesting to see numbers, but I'd bet usage on facebook has gone up massively since their redesign and new emphasis on the 'stream'.

I would agree that most Facebook users are more active nowadays after the stream redesign.

It's funny, because when the redesign went live, about 90% of my friends where bitching about how they 'hated' the new design. Now they're the most active people on my list.

That's because they have tweaked the stream design quite a lot after the redesign. You no longer get multiple entries for every photo your friend has uploaded etc.

Doesn't facebook add a twitter worth of users every week?

MySpace has had an Open Activity Streams for awhile now. Facebook is just catching up on the one or two things they were behind on.

Until there's a fully public timeline and full search capability like twitter, this news is mediocre at best.

The problem is, Facebook can probably never do this. Most people have their profiles quarantined off. If for some reason facebook ever over-rode those settings and made their stuff public, a true public outcry would occur.

If facebook somehow DOES open full search capability like twitter search/open public timeline, then wow, we're in for something entirely new. The data there and possibilities make me feel like a kid in a candy store.

It would be easy enough to add a "make public" checkbox. And instead of just having add as friend, add a "follow" button. the hard part is getting 200m users, they already did that. The really part part is making money and well that's still TBA.

i'm curious why public streams and search are so cool.

Mediocre for whom, exactly?

This sounds like what we have been waiting for, for long long time from facebook. I can't wait to get this implemented on my aggregation site, friendbinder.

One of the things I like about the Facebook stream is that it's only viewable by my friends by default. Does this API take posts outside the Facebook realm?

You always have control over that [1], and I think the default is still friends only.

[1] http://www.facebook.com/privacy/

The fb air application doesn't add nothing to the user interaction. It looks like chrome application I have for fb... I can't distinguish them!

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