Facebook Reveals Improved Open Stream API

Facebook has announced that it will be extending the functionality of the Open Stream API, which allows developers of third-party apps to interact with the content on the social network, to enable updating and retrieving content from Pages along with other changes that make the API significantly more powerful.

“We launched the Open Stream API in April to give developers access to a core Facebook experience, and the ability to publish users' streams. The Open Stream API supports several different publishing methods as well as the Atom-based Activity Streams framework for reading the stream.” Yariv Sadan, Facebook developer, wrote. “Today, we are announcing updates to the Open API Stream.”

One of the changes that will impact users the most is the fact that the stream.get method no longer requires them to be engaged in an active session, allowing desktop clients to display content from the Pages the users are following as well as allowing them to post comments from inside the desktop apps. This will permit applications like TweetDeck and Seesmic Desktop to expand their Facebook integration and, more importantly, will allow Facebook to better compete with Twitter, which has been very open to third-party apps and services. Another small change that should make a great difference is the fact that the site now shows where the updates were coming from with a 'via' label, again, similar to Twitter's.

A new feature that could make for some very interesting applications is the JavaScript version of the stream.publish method, allowing web developers to integrate the functionality into their sites. One use for this would be allowing developers to create better “share” buttons, which many sites now sport, giving them the possibility to choose exactly what should be shared on Facebook and what the entries should look like.