Fred Wilson, who writes the excellent A VC blog, writes that Facebook has announced that they are opening up API access to user’s status updates.
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. via Facebook Developers blog.
On a service like Match it takes me five clicks and a short waiting period to update my intro and/or headline. Now I know Match would never do this with Facebook because you can’t have customer service reps approving millions of status updates every day, but for the majority of dating sites, reflecting people’s Facebook status in their dating profile is a fantastic way to make online dating profiles more dynamic. Question: How many dating profiles have not been updated in the past 30 days and how does that affect members who appear “stale”?
But as Joshua Schachter (founder of Delicious bookmarking service) explained to me a few years ago now, reduction of services to the simplest user experiences is a powerful generator of focused activity. And that’s what is going on at Facebook and across the social networking sector right now. Status is universal. Not everyone takes photos or videos, or plays games. But everyone has a status and it changes. It’s also quick and easy to post a status message. And it’s massively conversational (something we didn’t quite realize until Twitter users invented the @reply).
I’ve been more active on Twitter lately and it was amazing to see how many people and brands are using the service.
I’ve got emails out to people deep into the Facebook platform about what the continuing openness means for third-party websites. Main question, is a website the same as a Facebook application, i.e., can dating sites actually pull data from Facebook about users’ status messages, notes, shared links, and videos?
You can Share contact info, social graph via Google Profiles too.
