Tag Archives: API

Facebook Gets It

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Near the beginning of the month I had made two blog posts in relation to API. One of the things I wished I could do was to have a status update across multiple social sites, from Facebook to Twitter.

Well – you can. Facebook has apparently included the ability for applications on it’s site to push info into the status area. Although it’s not quite as easy as checking a button in your profile settings, it’s simple enough. All you have to do is use the application TwitterSync. TwitterSync will take whatever update you post on Twitter and change your Facebook status accordingly. Furthermore, if you wish it can filter out certain commands so that it doesn’t pull certain tweets. For instance, if you’re blog updates your Twitter page with a link to the post and a notification that it’s been updated and you don’t want it to be posted on your status, you can enter a keyword and it won’t post any tweets containing that keyword.

In addition to that, I’m now using Google Talk to update my Twitter page, so I don’t even have to open up a browser. Simply send a message to the Twitter account on Gtalk and it sends it.

Nifty stuff. Get on board MySpace??

More On API

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Following up on my previous post on API’s. . .

If Facebook and MySpace would open up a little bit, imagine how nice it would be to send your status across multiple services. For instance, I like having Twitter for it’s stand-alone “what am I doing” style status. It would be nice if I could tell Facebook and MySpace to import a status RSS feed from Twitter, which it already has available for anyone to use. For you still not quite up to speed on web trends, that would basically pull anything I posted on twitter to be displayed on Facebook and MySpace so I didn’t have to login to multiple networks.

Why isn’t this happening now? Probably stubborness to keep you on one social network and not drift to others. Most of these sites make the majority of their revenue serving adverts on your pages – just like TV commercials but the majority of them have content and services you don’t have to pay for. Now I honestly don’t think it really would have a huge impact on revenue to add this – infact, I know I’d rather use a service that was more open to making it easier for their users.

Unfortunately, services like Pownce, Twitter, del.icio.us and more aren’t being utilized by average internet users. Don’t get me wrong – these sites have a large database of users, but they’re still not touching your average teenage to adolescent userbase in areas like the midwest – and while I know few users in my area taking advantages of these services, almost everyone has both a Facebook and a MySpace. If the demand was there, I’m sure we’d see even more support across websites and services.

There’s so many ideas that would be very neat if implemented to provide support and data across networks. Unforunately, data always has a price and everyone wants it, no matter how mundane it seems to you.

And one last thing, as a side note. Facebook and MySpace are virtually the same anymore – including both having applications which you’ll see rolling out on MySpace very soon. I’ve been tinkering with the opensocial API (I signed up for the dev program after writing my last post on API) and it’s easy enough to use that I’d put a pretty good wager on you’ll start getting those invites you hate on Facebook in your MySpace inbox any day here.