I have begun to ease my innate cynicism re: Facebook (although I use it fairly often, and keep in touch with some friends, I have been less than enthusiastic about it’s conversational features. It seems to be all about little tidbits, and showing off interests, photos, and music. I haven’t mentioned it here on my blog in quite a while, but I have long been keenly interested in ways for churches to use online resources to enable people to keep in touch and widen that touch to new folks, who have been found via this linking of common interests and passions. This post on the Facebook API group facebook page describes some real encouraging developments:
Specifically, your applications can now directly access all of a user’s status, links, and notes via new methods and FQL calls. Your application will have access to any status, notes, or links from the active user or their friends that are currently visible to the active user. In addition, we’re opening new APIs for you to post links, create notes, or upload videos for the current user, and we’ve made setting a user’s status easier.
We’re pretty excited to see what kinds of ideas you can come up with to help users create and share more content. For example, a travel application could make it really easy for users to create and share notes and upload photos and videos from a recent trip. Users could then display that content within a profile tab for that app. Or a news website could use Facebook Connect to allow users to easily post links from the site and feature all of the most recent links that a user’s friends have shared from that website.
