Everyone knows about Facebook Application development framework and many has already implemented, used and monetize by taking benefits of viral marketing.
Now, Facebook has blast with yet another surprise with the release of “fbOpen” – What’s that?
Till date, developers had used the APIs based upon REST to leverage the advantage of a large user base of the Facebook by launching their own applications on Facebook. With the help of Facebook Platform API which was launched in August, 2006.
Taking another step, now FB has release or I would say opened up the actual Framework on which Facebook it self is built and running. It is a snapshot of the Facebook Platform and it contains most of the part which a developer will require to develop their own application on this framework.
Developers can download fbOpen which includes all the tits and bits of the framework that are, API infrastructure, the FBML parser, the FQL parser, and FBJS, as well as implementations of many common methods and tags.
When I read first about fbOpen then I wonder that what is it meant for? So, I have started to dig the use of fbOpen.
The most apparent usage which FB has mentioned is
“The goal of this release is to help you as developers better understand Facebook Platform as a whole and more easily build applications, whether it’s by running your own test servers, building tools, or optimizing your applications on this technology. We’ve built in extensibility points, so you can add functionality to Facebook Open Platform like your own tags and API methods. We’re also hoping you use Facebook Open Platform in ways we’ve never thought of – just as you showed off your creativity with Facebook Platform, we hope this lets you be creative with the foundation of the platform itself.”
Of course reading this is always impressive however I believe that there is a more strategic planning must have taken place while releasing fbOpen. If the fbOpen will also be used extensively by developers in a similar passion of Facebook Platform API then definitely, FB will take a leap in a Social Networking Website Market and its marketshare will increase much faster and much broader too. This must be the nucleolus point thinking while releasing the fbOpen as FB is looking to beat MySpace shortly on the user base and they wanted to continue to grow.
I think there is nothing better than involving the developers to increase the user base indirectly as the developer community can spread the FB and its platform much faster on multiple websites to do the business with their clients. So, eventually more and more website owners will make their websites or their applications in sync with Facebook which eventually attracts the parent website users to visit FB more frequently.
This is surely hitting a significant new users to register on FB and this is what the Viarl Marketing is!
So, now I have started to look on fbOpen and trying to make my hands dirty so that I can put my real time experience with fbOpen.
If you are looking to get more information then you can download fbOpen. Can Look to Anatomy, Quick Videos to develop “Hello Worl”! and FAQ from all these links.
I believe that if the same ease of development capabilities are continued with fbOpen then FB should get a good mileage with its strategy however this is too early to even guess on this aspect so I am keeping this guess open for your comments…!
Jun 18th by admin
