Colin's Blog My thoughts on everything.

7Mar/07Off

Clarifying the Facebook Developer Platform

So, yes, I recently became a Facebook junkie/addict/creeper... Recently, a few of my FB friends have posted concerns about Facebook selling information to 3rd parties via the 'Facebook Developer Platform'. As far as I know (and I'm not affiliated with FB in any way) this is basically untrue.

The Developer Platform is intended to open up Facebook to 3rd party application developers so that they can create cool applications like 'Friendly Views', 'Bookfaced' and the Facebook Toolbar for Firefox. The key to these apps is that no is that you must login into Facebook to use them... they don't expose any more information to users than is available on Facebook itself.

friendlyFriendly Views, for example, uses the Google Maps API to display the hometowns of everyone in MY list of friends - nothing else. It also allows you to download all of my friends birthdays into Outlook - which is handy. Again, there is nothing here that isn't available via Facebook. The info is the same - the presentation is different.

I'm not sure where the accusation about 'selling info to advertisers' comes from, but if that's happening, it has nothing to do with the Developer Platform.

Again, I'm not affiliated with Facebook, nor am I defending anything they do, I just don't like misinformation...

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